LINES OF SUCCESSION
In a very direct and personal way, each generation of Williamsburg physician-apothecary trained its successor. Two particularly illustrative lines began with Dr. George Gilmer.
At one time in 1745 it appears that Gilmer had an apprentice by the name of James Carter. A few years later Carter opened an apothecary shop of his own at the sign of the Unicorn’s Horn, next door to the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg. Carter in turn took Andrew Anderson as apprentice, and in due time when Anderson had attain the status of “doctor,” took him into partnership. This combination lasted only two years, and James Carter later formed a partnership with his brother William, a physician. After another few years James sold his share of the apothecary shop to William but apparently continued independently to practice medicine until his death in 1794.
Gilmer, of course, had long since taken another apprentice in young James Carter’s place. Billy Pasteur was the son of the barber and wigmaker, who could not afford to send his son abroad for medical study. But at the end of his apprenticeship, Pasteur did go to London with the help of Dr. Gilmer for a year’s study at St. Thomas’s Hospital. He returned to Williamsburg and opened shop just after his benefactor’s death. It would seem probable that he took over Gilmer’s shop before building his own, though the record does not say.
Pasteur, in his own turn, had at least two apprentices who later practiced in Williamsburg. The second, Robert Nicolson, shortly moved his apothecary shop and medical practice to Yorktown, thereby taking himself out of this narrative. His predecessor, John Minson Galt, remained in Williamsburg and in the medical profession until 1808. Like Dr. Gilmer, who educated his own son, George Gilmer, Jr., in medicine, John Minson Galt launched two of his sons into medicine via apprenticeship.
A son of Samuel Galt, the silversmith, John Minson Galt was apprenticed at the age of 14 to William Pasteur, who himself had just set up shop and was only half a dozen years older. The apprenticeship appears to have lasted a full term of seven years. It was followed by two years of medicine in London. There the young man studied the theory and practice of physic under Dr. Hugh Smith, midwifery under Dr. Colin McKenzie, and surgery, anatomy, and operations at St. Thomas’s Hospital. Galt is also said to have attended the College of William and Mary—presumably before going abroad—and to have pursued his medical studies in Edinburgh and Paris as well as in London. All of this made John Minson Galt undoubtedly the best educated apothecary-surgeon of eighteenth-century Williamsburg.
On his return to Williamsburg in 1769 he bought “a box of Surgeon’s Instruments,” married Judith Craig, and announced his intention to open shop at “the Brick House, opposite the Coffee House when he gets his utensils fixed.” The Virginia Gazette’s notice of the marriage was short and full of confident optimism:
This evening Doctor JOHN MINSON GALT, of this city, was married to Miss JUDITH CRAIG, eldest daughter of Mr. ALEXANDER CRAIG. The mutual affection and familiarity of disposition in this agreeable pair, afford the strongest assurance of their enjoying the highest felicity in the nuptial state.
In setting up shop as an apothecary-surgeon in Williamsburg, Galt was not exactly filling a vacuum. In fact, the same issue of the Gazette in which he announced himself carried long advertisements by two other apothecaries. One was Galt’s former master and benefactor, William Pasteur; the other was “Andrew Anderson, Surgeon and Man-Midwife,” also just launching in practice. Altogether the ads occupy a little over one whole column of the paper, and each consists almost solely of a list of the items available at that shop.
It is interesting to notice that William Pasteur had imported a new supply of goods in the same ship with Galt’s “compleat assortment,” and just in time: