Since the biographical material on Pott's non-professional life reveals so many intellectual and political interests, it would be surprising if he had not occasionally neglected his medical practice. He gave considerable time to the colony's administration and he served in 1629 as the elected temporary governor of the colony after having previously been on the governor's council. His activities in politics and affairs brought him political enemies and explain, in part, the cattle theft charge and the court's finding of "guilty" (although this was later found "rigorous if not erroneous"). He died in 1642, having been intimately involved in the life of the colony for twenty years.
Pott was the last of the outstanding figures who practiced medicine under the direction of the Company, but Dr. Wyndham B. Blanton has found mention of over 200 persons who served as physicians or surgeons during some portion of the century. With only one exception, however, none of these achieved as prominent a place in history as Bohun, Russell, or Pott. Not only is the number of outstanding individuals in the field of medicine less, but the general quality of medical practice, in the opinion of Dr. Blanton, was not as high again during the last three-quarters of the seventeenth century as it had been during the administration of the Company (1607-1624) when Virginia medicine included a representative cross-section of English medicine.
Any survey—no matter how brief—of the medical profession during the century, however, should include mention of a man who, although not a full-time professional physician, proves to be the exception to Dr. Blanton's generalization about the prominence of individual medical men and the quality of medical practice during the late 1600's. This man, the Reverend John Clayton, is a noteworthy example of the intellectual level an individual could attain and maintain while living in an area that was still remote from European civilization.
Clayton, who is known to have been at Jamestown between 1684 and 1686 as a clergyman, also practiced medicine in addition to pursuing his scientific interests. As a prolific writer he has left some of the fullest and most interesting accounts of contemporary treatment and diagnosis. His knowledge and methods cannot be taken as typical, however, because his intellectual level was considerably above the average in the colony.
This minister-scientist-physician wrote an account of his treatment of a case of hydrophobia resulting from the bite of a rabid dog. With its accomplished style, Clayton's account of his treatment of hydrophobia is worthy of attention as an example of contemporary theory and practice of the more learned kind. He wrote:
It was a relapse of its former distemper, that is, of the bite of the mad-dog. I told them, if any thing in the world would save his life, I judged it might be the former vomit of volatile salts; they could not tell what to do, nevertheless such is the malignancy of the world, that as soon as it was given, they ran away and left me, saying, he was now certainly a dead man, to have a vomit given in that condition. Nevertheless it pleased God that he shortly after cried, this fellow in the black has done me good, and after the first vomit, came so to himself, as to know us all.
Subsequently, Clayton "vomited him" every other day and made him take volatile salt of amber between vomitings. The patient also drank "posset-drink" with "sage and rue," and washed his hands and sores in a strong salt brine. Cured by the "fellow in the black," the patient had no relapse.
Clayton reveals more of his medical theory in another passage from his writings. He observed:
In September the weather usually breaks suddenly, and there falls generally very considerable rains. When the weather breaks many fall sick, this being the time of an endemical sickness, for seasonings, cachexes, fluxes, scorbutical dropsies, gripes, or the like which I have attributed to this reason. That by the extraordinary heat, the ferment of the blood being raised too high, and the tone of the stomach relaxed, when the weather breaks the blood palls, and like overfermented liquors is depauperated, or turns eager and sharp, and there's a crude digestion, whence the name distempers may be supposed to ensue.
In this passage Clayton's medical theory resembles closely the orthodox medical beliefs of the century. The great English practitioner Sydenham, for example, emphasized the relationship between the weather and disease. Also the analogy between the behavior of blood and wine was then conventional, and the supposed connection between the "sour" blood and indigestion with the resulting acid humors is in accord with Galenism. The remedy—and a most logical one—was medicine to combat the acidity and to restore the tone or balance to the stomach. Acid stomach has a long history.