Produced by Stephen Hutcheson and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net 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 [Illustration: Decorative capital] 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. Medical theories and practices at the beginning of the seventeenth century were largely those that had prevailed since the time of Galen, a Greek physician who died about two centuries after Christ. According to Galen, the four elements of Aristotelian science—fire, water, air, and earth—comprised the four major humors of the human body: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Blood was held to be moist and warm, phlegm was moist and cool, yellow bile dry and warm, and black bile dry and cold. Sickness, in the theory of Galen, was caused by one or more of these humors becoming impure or out of place or out of balance. Treatment thus consisted of removing or diminishing the offending humor by purging, bleeding, vomiting, blistering, urinating, sweating, or salivating; on the other hand, a deficient humor was to be restored by diet and drugs. Galen classed drugs according to their warm, cold, moist, or dry qualities. For instance, pepper was a heating drug, good for chills, while cucumber was a cool one, to be given in case of fever.