Lest it appear that all Williamsburg “practicers” made a habit of charging excessive fees, the generous treatment an earlier doctor gave at least one of his patients must be set down. George Hume, a Scottish merchant who came to Virginia about 1722 and soon caught all the prevalent ills, found the place “only good for doctors and ministers who have very good encouragem’nt here.” One of the “common distempers” that afflicted Hume was dysentery, then called the flux. He was laid so low that Dr. John Brown all but despaired of his life. Hume’s gratitude for being cured was doubtless enhanced by the fact—carefully reported to his Scottish relatives—that “ye Dr. took nothing for my druggs.” The third section of the act, specifying exactly what the “practicer of phisic” should set forth in his bill, bears if least a faint augury of modern food-and-drug labeling legislation: III. And to the end the true value of the medicines administered by any practicer in phisic, may be better known, and judged of, _Be it further enacted, by the authority aforesaid_, That whenever any pills, bolus, portion, draught, electuary, decoction, or any medicines, in any form whatsoever, shall be administered to any sick person, the person administering the same shall, at the same time, deliver in his bill, expressing every particular thing made up therein; or if the medicine administered, be a simple, or compound, directed in the _dispensatories_, the true name thereof shall be expressed in the same bill, together with the quantities and prices, in both cases. And in failure thereof, such practicer, or any apothecary, making up the prescription of another, shall be nonsuited, in any action or suit hereafter commenced, which shall be grounded upon such bill or bills: Nor shall any book, or account, of any practicer in phisic, or any apothecary, be permitted to be given in evidence, before a court; unless the articles therein contained, be charged according to the directions of this act. This final section reveals that some differentiation between the branches of the medical profession had already begun in America. The tip-off is the phrase that imposes on “any apothecary making up the prescription of another” the same requirements as on physicians who make up their own prescriptions. _THE DOCTORS OF WILLIAMSBURG_ If competition tends to keep prices low, fees charged in and around the capital city in the early eighteenth century should have been at the rock bottom level. Governor Gooch in 1729 reported to London that Williamsburg abounded in physicians. The same year young Adam Cunningham gave up his brief effort to establish himself in practice as a doctor: [Illustration: _Another illustration from the Diderot encyclopedia shows the operation of trepanning a skull and some surgical tools in common use in the eighteenth century, in colonial America as well as in Europe._]