Gilmer’s career as an apothecary-surgeon-physician was not without its ups and downs. Soon after buying the property on Palace Green, he was giving away samples of rattlesnake root on behalf of Dr. John Tennent, who maintained it would cure pleurisy, the gout, rheumatism, and mad-dog bites.
At the same time the Virginia Gazette, Williamsburg’s new weekly, carried the news that “on Monday Morning last, dy’d, at Mr. Geo. Gilmer’s, in this City, Mrs. Susanna Skaife, ... and was decently interr’d on Wensday. And, on Thursday Morning also dy’d, the Rev. Mr. John Skaife, her Husband, after a tedious Indisposition.” It would appear that at least Mrs. Skaife was a bed patient in Dr. Gilmer’s home; this was a usual way of caring for serious illnesses before the day of hospitals.
Surrounded by the equipment of his craft, this young apothecary is making up a prescription of some kind, probably for pills. The illustration traces back to a London publication, The Book of Trades or Library of Useful Arts, first American edition published in 1807 by J. Johnson and for sale in his bookstore in Philadelphia and in Richmond, Virginia.
Soon thereafter, Gilmer found it necessary to insert the following advertisement in the Virginia Gazette:
Williamsburg May 26, 1737.
There being a Report industriously spread about the Country, of George Gilmer’s Death, by some well-meaning People, and of his being so much in Debt, that nothing from England would be sent him this Year, if alive.
To obviate such scandalous and groundless Reports, I take this Opportunity to acquaint all my Friends, that I can now, better than ever, supply them with all manner of Chymical and Galenical Medicines, truly and faithfully prepared, and at as cheap Rates as can be had from England. Also Double-refin’d, Single refin’d, and Lump Sugars, Cinnamon, Cloves, Mace, Nutmegs, Bateman’s Drops, Squire’s Elixir, Anderson’s Pills, Sweet Oil, &c. at reasonable Rates; at my Old Shop, near the Governor’s.
George Gilmer
Nine years later Gilmer was so much alive and active as to be mayor of the city, the owner of a new four-wheeled chaise, and once more a bridegroom. On the death of his second wife, Gilmer had promptly married his next-door neighbor. The third Mrs. Gilmer was Harrison Blair, daughter of Dr. Archibald Blair and sister of the Hon. John Blair of the governor’s council. The apothecary’s star was rising.
He was still, of course, a shopkeeper. His “Old Shop near the Governor’s” stood at the very edge of Palace Green, a frame building of about 20 feet square. Every year or so he advertised the arrival from England of a shipment of drugs, medicines, spices, and groceries—to be sold at the shop, wholesale or retail, and at reasonable rates.
Archaeological excavations on the site of the first theater, and extending north of it onto the adjacent Brush-Everard House property, yielded quantities of Dr. Gilmer’s domestic and pharmaceutical rubbish. The latter included delftware ointment pots and drug jars, glass medicine phials and fragments of carboys, bottles for Pyrmont mineral water, a brass pestle, and, inexplicably, a human jaw. Just how, or if, that related to Gilmer’s shop remains open to conjecture, but it is evident from the quantity of pharmaceutical artifacts recovered that Dr. Gilmer’s business was as extensive as his 1737 advertisement claimed.
Indeed, Gilmer was no ordinary shopkeeper. His social status—doubtless bolstered by that of his wife’s family—was great enough that he could be among the first to entertain the newly appointed Governor Dinwiddie. One suspects that either the ambitious Dr. Gilmer or his well-born wife decided that his house on Palace Street fell short of such prestigious demands. Six months after the dinner for Dinwiddie, the apothecary was having his dining room wainscoted, with a marble fireplace, a mirror over the mantel, and a cabinet to contain the set of new china his wife had ordered from London.