Physicians and Surgeons in Seventeenth-Century Virginia
The first English medical man to set foot on Virginia soil visited the Chesapeake Bay area in 1603. Henry Kenton, a surgeon attached to a fleet exploring Virginia waters, joined the landing party that perished to a man at the hands of the Indians. Next to arrive in Virginia were the two surgeons who accompanied the first settlers in 1607 and attended their medical needs.
One of these, Thomas Wotton, was classed as a gentleman, while the other, Will Wilkinson, was listed with the laborers and craftsmen, a reminder of the varied social backgrounds of surgeons. Captain John Smith complimented Wotton in the summer of 1607 for skillful diligence in treating the sick; but Edward Maria Wingfield, when council president at Jamestown, criticized him for remaining aboard ship when the need for him ashore was so great. Because of this reputed slothfulness, Wingfield would not authorize funds for Wotton to purchase drugs and other necessaries. The colony could only have suffered from such a misunderstanding.
Further activities of Wotton and Wilkinson have faded into the mist of time past, but Captain John Smith recorded for posterity the names and deeds of other surgeons and physicians who came to Virginia before 1609. Dr. Walter Russell, the first physician—as distinguished from surgeon—to arrive, came with a contingent of new settlers and supplies in January, 1608. Post Ginnat, a surgeon, and two apothecaries, Thomas Field and John Harford, accompanied the physician. Also in Smith's record is the name, Anthony Bagnall, who has been identified as a surgeon and who came with the first supply.
Unfortunately, neither contemporaries of Russell, Ginnat, Field, and Harford—nor the men themselves—found reason to record the medical assistance they rendered during a time of great need. Russell is remembered only for the assistance he gave Smith when the Captain was severely wounded by a stingray, Post Ginnat and the apothecaries leave their names only, and Bagnall is remembered for his part in the adventures encountered on one of Captain Smith's exploratory journeys.
Russell's services to Smith deserved note because the Captain was expected to die from the stingray wound. It is an interesting comment on the medicine of the time that Smith's companions prepared his grave within four hours after the accident. "Yet by the helpe of a precious oile, Doctour Russel applyed, ere night his tormenting paine was so wel asswaged that he eate the fish to his supper."
The same stingray also assured the surgeon Bagnall a place in history. Mention of Bagnall by Captain Smith followed the surgeon's exploits on another expedition when he went along to treat the Captain's same stingray wound. The party, attacked by savages, shot one Indian in the knee and "our chirurgian ... so dressed this salvage that within an hour he looked somewhat chearfully and did eate and speake."
How unfortunate that other exploits of these physicians and surgeons, not involving Captain Smith—or the stingray—did not cause him to make a record. Dr. Lawrence Bohun, however, who accompanied Lord De la Warr to the colony in 1610, evoked comments of a more general nature in the accounts of contemporaries.
Dr. Bohun ministered to the settlers who had been ready to abandon Jamestown in 1610. A letter from the governor and council to the London Company, July 7, 1610, describes his problems and his efforts to meet them. Insomuch as the letter gives one of the fullest accounts of early Jamestown medical practices and because Bohun is one of the most renowned of seventeenth-century Virginia physicians, it deserves a lengthy quotation:
Mr. Dr. Boone [Bohun] whose care and industrie for the preservation of our men's lives (assaulted with strange fluxes and agues), we have just cause to commend unto your noble favours; nor let it, I beseech yee, be passed over as a motion slight and of no moment to furnish us with these things ... since we have true experience how many men's lives these physicke helpes have preserved since our coming, God so blessing the practise and diligence of our doctor, whose store has nowe growne thereby to so low an ebb, as we have not above 3 weekes phisicall provisions; if our men continew still thus visited with the sicknesses of the countrie, of the which every season hath his particular infirmities reigning in it, as we have it related unto us by the old inhabitants; and since our owne arrivall, have cause to feare it to be true, who have had 150 at a time much afflicted, and I am perswaded had lost the greatest part of them, if we had not brought these helpes with us.