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 from London to settle at Jamestown in 1607 and 1608, seven were practitioners of medicine—as it was then practiced: Walter Russell, Gent., was a “Doctour of Physicke,” which is to say that he had studied at a university and earned a degree in medicine; Thomas Wotton, Will Wilkinson, and Post Ginnat were listed as surgeons—“chirurgeon” as it then appeared; Thomas Field and John Harford bore the label of apothecaries; and the seventh was “Tho: Cowper the Barber.”
Plainly, the Virginia Company of London, numbering several prominent medical men among its backers, wanted its adventurers to the New World to have the best of medical care. Unfortunately for about four of every five settlers in the first few years at Jamestown, the best was not enough to avert wholesale mortality from sickness, Indian arrows, and “meere famine.” That some of the medical men shared the fate of their patients seems likely in the absence of later information about most of them.