The first English medical man to set foot on Virginia soil visited the
Chesapeake Bay area in 1603. Henry Kenton, a surgeon attached to a
fleet exploring Virginia waters, joined the landing party that perished
to a man at the hands of the Indians. Next to arrive in Virginia were
the two surgeons who accompanied the first settlers in 1607 and
attended their medical needs.
One of these, Thomas Wotton, was classed as a gentleman, while the
other, Will Wilkinson, was listed with the laborers and craftsmen, a
reminder of the varied social backgrounds of surgeons. Captain John
Smith complimented Wotton in the summer of 1607 for skillful diligence
in treating the sick; but Edward Maria Wingfield, when council
president at Jamestown, criticized him for remaining aboard ship when
the need for him ashore was so great. Because of this reputed
slothfulness, Wingfield would not authorize funds for Wotton to
purchase drugs and other necessaries. The colony could only have
suffered from such a misunderstanding.
Further activities of Wotton and Wilkinson have faded into the mist of
time past, but Captain John Smith recorded for posterity the names and
deeds of other surgeons and physicians who came to Virginia before
1609. Dr. Walter Russell, the first physician--as distinguished from
surgeon--to arrive, came with a contingent of new settlers and supplies
in January, 1608. Post Ginnat, a surgeon, and two apothecaries, Thomas
Field and John Harford, accompanied the physician. Also in Smith's
record is the name, Anthony Bagnall, who has been identified as a
surgeon and who came with the first supply.
Unfortunately, neither contemporaries of Russell, Ginnat, Field, and
Harford--nor the men themselves--found reason to record the medical
assistance they rendered during a time of great need. Russell is
remembered only for the assistance he gave Smith when the Captain was
severely wounded by a stingray, Post Ginnat and the apothecaries leave
their names only, and Bagnall is remembered for his part in the
adventures encountered on one of Captain Smith's exploratory journeys.
Russell's services to Smith deserved note because the Captain was
expected to die from the stingray wound. It is an interesting comment
on the medicine of the time that Smith's companions prepared his grave
within four hours after the accident. "Yet by the helpe of a precious
oile, Doctour Russel applyed, ere night his tormenting paine was so wel
asswaged that he eate the fish to his supper."
The same stingray also assured the surgeon Bagnall a place in history.
Mention of Bagnall by Captain Smith followed the surgeon's exploits on
another expedition when he went along to treat the Captain's same
stingray wound. The party, attacked by savages, shot one Indian in the
knee and "our chirurgian ... so dressed this salvage that within an
hour he looked somewhat chearfully and did eate and speake."
How unfortunate that other exploits of these physicians and surgeons,
not involving Captain Smith--or the stingray--did not cause him to make
a record. Dr. Lawrence Bohun, however, who accompanied Lord De la Warr
to the colony in 1610, evoked comments of a more general nature in the
accounts of contemporaries.
Dr. Bohun ministered to the settlers who had been ready to abandon
Jamestown in 1610. A letter from the governor and council to the London
Company, July 7, 1610, describes his problems and his efforts to meet
them. Insomuch as the letter gives one of the fullest accounts of early
Jamestown medical practices and because Bohun is one of the most
renowned of seventeenth-century Virginia physicians, it deserves a
lengthy quotation:
Mr. Dr. Boone [Bohun] whose care and industrie for the preservation
of our men's lives (assaulted with strange fluxes and agues), we
have just cause to commend unto your noble favours; nor let it, I
beseech yee, be passed over as a motion slight and of no moment to
furnish us with these things ... since we have true experience how
many men's lives these physicke helpes have preserved since our
coming, God so blessing the practise and diligence of our doctor,
whose store has nowe growne thereby to so low an ebb, as we have
not above 3 weekes phisicall provisions; if our men continew still
thus visited with the sicknesses of the countrie, of the which
every season hath his particular infirmities reigning in it, as we
have it related unto us by the old inhabitants; and since our owne
arrivall, have cause to feare it to be true, who have had 150 at a
time much afflicted, and I am perswaded had lost the greatest part
of them, if we had not brought these helpes with us.
Dr. Bohun sought medical supplies from abroad, but he also experimented
with indigenous natural matter such as plants and earths in an effort
to replenish his dwindling supplies and to discover natural products of
value in the New World. Judging by a contemporary account, Bohun,
professionally trained in the Netherlands, used drugs therapeutically
according to the conventional theories of the humoral school. Despite
the disfavor in which frequent purgings are held today, it must be
allowed that those being treated then sounded a plaintive call for more
of Bohun's "physicke."
The colony lost his services when he left to accompany Lord De la Warr
to the West Indies. His connection with the London Company and its
colony did not lapse, however, for Bohun received an appointment as
physician-general for the colony in December, 1620. At sea, on the way
to fill his post, the physician-general found his ship engaged with two
Spanish men-of-war. In the course of battle, an enemy shot mortally
wounded the man who had survived great hazards at Jamestown.
After the departure of Bohun with Lord De la Warr, no physician or
surgeon of equal stature or reputation took up residence in Virginia
until Dr. John Pott arrived almost ten years later. It is likely that
there was a shortage not only of outstanding medical men during these
years, but also of medical assistance in general. Sir Thomas Dale,
acting as deputy governor in the absence of De la Warr, wrote in the
spring of 1611 that "our wante likewise of able chirurgions is not a
little." Other requests for physicians and for apothecaries were
dispatched to the London Company during this period.
However, despite the seeming shortage of medical assistance, the
colonists survived such disorders as the summer seasoning much more
frequently than in the first years at Jamestown. An account of Virginia
written between 1616 and 1618 noted of the settlers that:
They have fallen sick, yet have recovered agayne, by very small
meanes, without helpe of fresh diet, or comfort of wholsome
phisique, there being at the first but few phisique helpes, or
skilful surgeons, who knew how to apply the right medecine in a new
country, or to search the quality and constitution of the patient,
and his distemper, or that knew how to councell, when to lett
blood, or not, or in necessity to use a launce in that office at
all.
Bohun died in March, 1621, and the Company named his successor as
physician to the colony in July. The conditions under which Dr. John
Pott accepted the post reveal the qualifications and needs of the
seventeenth-century medical man on his way to the New World, and the
inducements offered by the Company. He was a Cambridge Master of Arts
and claimed much experience in the practice of surgery and "phisique."
In addition, he made much of his expertness in the distilling of water.
The company allowed Pott a chest of medical supplies, a small library
of medical books, and provisions for the free passage of one or more
surgeons if they could be secured.
Additional economic inducements helped persuade Pott--and other
physicians--to make the arduous journey to America. In the eyes of the
Company, physicians could render especially valuable services to the
colony, and ranked with other persons of extraordinary talent such as
ministers, governors, state officers, officers of justice, and knights.
These individuals received special compensations in the form of land
and profits, in accord with the estimated value of services to be
rendered. In 1620, Dr. Bohun had had a promise--for taking the position
of physician-general for the colony--of an allotment of 500 acres of
land and ten servants; Pott accepted the job under about the same
conditions as had Bohun.
These inducements offered physicians to persuade them to go to Virginia
indicate the great need for, and the high value attached to, their
assistance in the seventeenth century. With the population in the
colony growing so great Dr. Pott's services were in considerable
demand; several years after his arrival a certain William Bennett built
the doctor a boat as he by then had a relatively large area to cover
and most of the outlying plantations stood on the rivers and creeks.
In the colony, Pott won recognition for his professional proficiency.
Even a political enemy, Governor Harvey, described him as skilled in
the diagnosis and therapy of epidemic diseases. Because he alone in the
colony was considered capable of treating epidemic diseases, a court
sentence against him for cattle theft stood suspended early in the
1630's and clemency was sought on his behalf.
Pott had become involved in other legal difficulties before 1630. In
1625, a case having medical and humorous implications brought him into
court. A Mrs. Blany maintained that Doctor Pott had denied her a piece
of hog flesh, and that his refusal had caused her to miscarry. The
court accepted Mrs. Blany's contention that she believed the denial of
the hog flesh caused her distress, but did not hold Pott guilty of
willful neglect.
Since the biographical material on Pott's non-professional life reveals
so many intellectual and political interests, it would be surprising if
he had not occasionally neglected his medical practice. He gave
considerable time to the colony's administration and he served in 1629
as the elected temporary governor of the colony after having previously
been on the governor's council. His activities in politics and affairs
brought him political enemies and explain, in part, the cattle theft
charge and the court's finding of "guilty" (although this was later
found "rigorous if not erroneous"). He died in 1642, having been
intimately involved in the life of the colony for twenty years.
Pott was the last of the outstanding figures who practiced medicine
under the direction of the Company, but Dr. Wyndham B. Blanton has
found mention of over 200 persons who served as physicians or surgeons
during some portion of the century. With only one exception, however,
none of these achieved as prominent a place in history as Bohun,
Russell, or Pott. Not only is the number of outstanding individuals in
the field of medicine less, but the general quality of medical
practice, in the opinion of Dr. Blanton, was not as high again during
the last three-quarters of the seventeenth century as it had been
during the administration of the Company (1607-1624) when Virginia
medicine included a representative cross-section of English medicine.
Any survey--no matter how brief--of the medical profession during the
century, however, should include mention of a man who, although not a
full-time professional physician, proves to be the exception to Dr.
Blanton's generalization about the prominence of individual medical men
and the quality of medical practice during the late 1600's. This man,
the Reverend John Clayton, is a noteworthy example of the intellectual
level an individual could attain and maintain while living in an area
that was still remote from European civilization.
Clayton, who is known to have been at Jamestown between 1684 and 1686
as a clergyman, also practiced medicine in addition to pursuing his
scientific interests. As a prolific writer he has left some of the
fullest and most interesting accounts of contemporary treatment and
diagnosis. His knowledge and methods cannot be taken as typical,
however, because his intellectual level was considerably above the
average in the colony.
This minister-scientist-physician wrote an account of his treatment of
a case of hydrophobia resulting from the bite of a rabid dog. With its
accomplished style, Clayton's account of his treatment of hydrophobia
is worthy of attention as an example of contemporary theory and
practice of the more learned kind. He wrote:
It was a relapse of its former distemper, that is, of the bite of
the mad-dog. I told them, if any thing in the world would save his
life, I judged it might be the former vomit of volatile salts; they
could not tell what to do, nevertheless such is the malignancy of
the world, that as soon as it was given, they ran away and left me,
saying, he was now certainly a dead man, to have a vomit given in
that condition. Nevertheless it pleased God that he shortly after
cried, _this fellow in the black has done me good_, and after the
first vomit, came so to himself, as to know us all.
Subsequently, Clayton "vomited him" every other day and made him take
volatile salt of amber between vomitings. The patient also drank
"posset-drink" with "sage and rue," and washed his hands and sores in a
strong salt brine. Cured by the "fellow in the black," the patient had
no relapse.
Clayton reveals more of his medical theory in another passage from his
writings. He observed:
In September the weather usually breaks suddenly, and there falls
generally very considerable rains. When the weather breaks many
fall sick, this being the time of an endemical sickness, for
seasonings, cachexes, fluxes, scorbutical dropsies, gripes, or the
like which I have attributed to this reason. That by the
extraordinary heat, the ferment of the blood being raised too high,
and the tone of the stomach relaxed, when the weather breaks the
blood palls, and like overfermented liquors is depauperated, or
turns eager and sharp, and there's a crude digestion, whence the
name distempers may be supposed to ensue.
In this passage Clayton's medical theory resembles closely the orthodox
medical beliefs of the century. The great English practitioner
Sydenham, for example, emphasized the relationship between the weather
and disease. Also the analogy between the behavior of blood and wine
was then conventional, and the supposed connection between the "sour"
blood and indigestion with the resulting acid humors is in accord with
Galenism. The remedy--and a most logical one--was medicine to combat
the acidity and to restore the tone or balance to the stomach. Acid
stomach has a long history.
The reasonableness of Clayton's pathology is impressive, but reason did
lead to some bizarre--in the light of present-day medical
knowledge--conclusions. Aware of the value to the scientist of close
observation and of the necessity to reason about these observations,
Clayton was in the finest seventeenth-century scientific tradition.
Observing a lady--for example--suffering from lead poisoning, he noted
that her distress, judging by her behavior, varied directly with the
nearness and bigness of the passing clouds; the nearer the clouds, the
more anguished her groans. Reason dictated to Clayton that such a
phenomenon stemmed from a cause-effect relationship.
Although the twentieth-century physician would deny the cloud-suffering
association, he would not deny Clayton's propensity for observation and
his attempts to discern relationships. The approach of the better
seventeenth-century Virginia physician can be labeled scientific even
if his facts were few.