THE
APOTHECARY
in Eighteenth-Century
WILLIAMSBURG
Being an Account of his medical and chirurgical Services, as well as of his trade Practices as a Chymist
Williamsburg Craft Series
WILLIAMSBURG
Published by Colonial Williamsburg
MCMXC
The Apothecary
in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg
Of the first 225 men sent over fromLondon to settle at Jamestown in 1607 and1608, seven were practitioners of medicine—asit was then practiced: Walter Russell,Gent., was a “Doctour of Physicke,” whichis to say that he had studied at a university and earned adegree in medicine; Thomas Wotton, Will Wilkinson, andPost Ginnat were listed as surgeons—“chirurgeon” asit then appeared; Thomas Field and John Harford borethe label of apothecaries; and the seventh was “Tho:Cowper the Barber.”
Plainly, the Virginia Company of London, numberingseveral prominent medical men among its backers, wantedits adventurers to the New World to have the best ofmedical care. Unfortunately for about four of every fivesettlers in the first few years at Jamestown, the best wasnot enough to avert wholesale mortality from sickness,Indian arrows, and “meere famine.” That some of themedical men shared the fate of their patients seems likelyin the absence of later information about most of them.
Medical theories and practices at the beginning of theseventeenth century were largely those that had prevailedsince the time of Galen, a Greek physician who died abouttwo centuries after Christ. According to Galen, the fourelements of Aristotelian science—fire, water, air, and2earth—comprised the four major humors of the humanbody: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Bloodwas held to be moist and warm, phlegm was moist andcool, yellow bile dry and warm, and black bile dry and cold.
Sickness, in the theory of Galen, was caused by one ormore of these humors becoming impure or out of placeor out of balance. Treatment thus consisted of removingor diminishing the offending humor by purging, bleeding,vomiting, blistering, urinating, sweating, or salivating;on the other hand, a deficient humor was to be restoredby diet and drugs. Galen classed drugs according to theirwarm, cold, moist, or dry qualities. For instance, pepperwas a heating drug, good for chills, while cucumber wasa cool one, to be given in case of fever.
Galenism had been subjected to attack in the sixteenthcentury by Paracelsus and Vesalius, but its appeal waslogical and remained strong in seventeenth-century England.(In fact, some survivals can be found in twentieth-centuryfolk medicine.) Dr. Lawrence Bohun (or Boone), whocame over in 1610 and returned to England in 1611, spentsome of the year investigating medicinal sources in Virginia.He discovered a white clay—and shipped some to England—thathe claimed could absorb and expel poisons from thebody. Among vegetable remedies, Bohun experimentedwith sassafras and found “Galbanum mechoacon, otherwisecalled rubarbum alum, to be of service in cold moistbodies, for the purginge of fleam