Sickness and Death
Pioneer life is all very well when the adventurer is in high health and spirits; but when sickness comes, he must be stout of heart indeed if he does not sigh for the comforts of a civilized home. The poor settlers had a sorry time of it in that first fatal summer on the banks of the James, when they breathed in malaria from the marshes and drank the germs of fever and “fluxes” in the muddy water. “If there were any conscience in men,” wrote gallant George Percy, “it would make their hearts bleed to hear the pitiful murmurings and outcries of our sick men, without relief, every day and night for the space of six weeks; some departing out of the world, many times three or four in a night, in the morning their bodies trailed out of their cabins, like dogs, to be buried.”
The adventurers profited by the lesson of these troublous times; for as soon as the settlement was fairly re-established under Dale, they set to work upon a hospital. On the river opposite Henrico, they put up “a guest-house for ye sicke people, a high seat and wholesome aire,” and christened the place, Mount Malado. The chronicles are provokingly silent as to any details of this first American sanitorium. They say nothing of its arrangements, its comforts, or its conveniences. We do not know even the names of those who shared its rude shelter, or of the physicians who treated them. From time to time the mention of some doctor is interwoven with the history of the colonists, but he passes as a pale shadow, with none of the character and substance of the gallant captains, the doughty burgesses, and the tipsy parsons. Doctor Bohun, who is described as “brought up amongst the most learned Surgeons and Physitions in Netherlands,” came over and stayed with the settlers for a while, but Lord La Warre carried him off as his medical adviser to the “Western Iles,” that his Lordship’s gout might be “asswaged by the meanes of fresh dyet, especially Oranges and Limons, an undoubted remedie for that disease”; and a little later the good doctor perished in a sea-fight with Spaniards on the ship Margaret and John. Dr. Simons’ name is signed to one of the histories, but he too fades away and leaves no trace, and a Dr. Pot has survived only through honorable mention, as “our worthy physition.”
Either the country was too healthy, or the inhabitants too poor to encourage immigration among doctors, for they were few and far between, and we find men of other trades acting in the capacity of physician. There was Captain Norton, for instance, “a valiant, industrious gentleman adorned with many good qualities besides Physicke and Chirurgery, which for the publicke good, he freely imparted to all gratis, but most bountifully to ye poore.”
It was common for barbers to combine the use of the knife with that of the razor, and for the apothecary to prescribe, as well as mix, his own drugs. Colonel Byrd writes that in Fredericksburg, “besides Col. Willis, who is the top man of the place, there are only one merchant, a tailor, a smith, an ordinary-keeper, and a lady who acts both as doctress and coffee-house keeper.” A list of prominent citizens in Baltimore in the eighteenth century, includes a barber, two carpenters, a tailor, a parson, and an inn-keeper, but no doctor; unless we reckon as such Dame Hughes and Dame Littig, who are registered as midwives.
The isolation of plantation life made it doubly difficult to depend on doctors, and as a result, each family had its own medicine-chest, and its own recipes and prescriptions handed down from generation to generation, and brought oftentimes from across the sea. Herbs played an important part in the pharmacopœia, both because they were easily obtained, and because tradition endowed them with mysterious virtues. An old medical treatise assures its readers that “Nature has stamped on divers plants legible characters to discover their uses”; that baldness may be cured by hanging-moss, and freckles by spotted plants. Ragwort, and periwinkle, and Solomon’s Seal all had their special merits; but sage was prime favorite, and its votary declares it a question how one who grows it in his garden and uses it freely can ever die. Next to ease of preparation, the prime requisite of a medicine was strength. Violent purges and powerful doses of physic or of “The Bark” were always in favor. The simple ailments of childhood were dosed with such abominations as copperas and pewter-filings, and these unhappy infants were fed on beverages of snake-root or soot-tea. One vile compound, common as it was odious, was snail pottage, made of garden shell-snails washed in small beer, mixed with earth-worms, and then fried in a concoction of ale, herbs, spices, and drugs.