barber died, and another, well acquainted with his profession, is very sick.”[1] The practice of the times was probably confined to bleeding, and the administration of salts and simples. These did not always succeed, however, for in some of the references in connection with epidemic disorders, it is stated that this mode of treatment was unsuccessful. A low type of disease may have been prevalent.
There are other allusions made to the Dutch-Swedish Colony on the Delaware. In a letter from Aldricks to the Director-General, Stuyvesant, March, 1659, the “causes” then operating against it are stated; among others, “that prevailing violent sickness which wasted a vast deal of goods and blood from one year to another, and which not only raged here, but everywhere throughout this province, and which consequently retarded, not only our progress in agriculture, but threw a damp over other undertakings.” In 1660, Beekman, the Collector, speaks of “Peter Tenneman to be employed as a surgeon by the Company,” and adds: “We are in want of a good surgeon, as it happened already more than once; thereto we wanted very much Mr. Williams, the barber (surgeon) in this city; but having then some patients there (probably New York) he could not come hither, and when he came he often had not by him such medicaments as the patients required, wherefore the sick are suffering.”[2]
These extracts furnish an interesting view of the posture of affairs, and of the difficulties encountered at the period.
The profession has always been burdened with charlatans, and the early history of it in this country presents no exception. Smith, who wrote in 1758, when speaking of the profession of New York, says: “A few physicians among us are eminent for their skill. Quacks abound like locusts in Egypt, and too many have been recommended to a full practice and profitable subsistence; this is less to be wondered at, as the
- ↑ This picture differs from a somewhat spiteful one of affairs by Gabriel Thomas: “Of Lawyers and Physicians I shall say nothing, because this Countrey is very Peaceable and Healty (sic); long may it so continue, and never have occasion for the Tongue of the one, nor the Pen of the other— both equaUy destructive to Men’s Estates and Lives; besides, forsooth, they, Hangman like, have a License to Murder and make Mischief.”—Op. cit., p. 32.
- ↑ Annals of Pennsylvania, p. 808.
