Cornish medics

By Charlotte MacKenzie

Cornish medics focuses on healthcare in Georgian Cornwall. It includes brief biographies of over 400 Georgian surgeons, apothecaries, druggists, physicians and other healthcare practitioners.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 27, 2024
• ISBN: 9781471605659

Book preview

Charlotte MacKenzie

Cornwall History

2024

Copyright © Charlotte MacKenzie 2024

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the copyright owner.

First printing: 2024

ISBN 9-781471-605659

Imprint lulu.com

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Knowing men

Women practitioners

Healthcare at home

Travel, spas, and Cornish wells

Cornish medics

Cornish medics brief biographies

My thanks to the Q Fund who partly funded this research with a grant made in November 2022.

Preface

Henry Quick of Zennor lived to tell the tale of being bitten by an adder as a child, in the Summer of 1799. The Cornish poet’s recollections of this experience were later narrated by him, in verse, as part of his life story.

When I was in my six years old,

A sad adventure I'll unfold,

Happened to me one Summer's day,

As I with mother took my way.

'Twas through a croft, by the wayside,

An adder in the ditch I spied;

The thing did look so fine and gay,

I felt inclin'd with it to play.

Quite ignorant and innocent,

What by its speckl'd back was meant,

I instantly my hand put down,

To take it up from off the ground.

The moment I had done this thing,

It sprang and stuck and pierc'd its sting,

Which was so sharp and poisonous strong,

Into the palm, and fast it hung.

My mother dear was sore affright,

When she look'd back and saw the sight,

It caus'd her to lament and cry,

And said that I should surely die.

No, mother, if I die don't cry,

I unto her did then reply;

She straightway took me by the hand,

And to a neighbour's house she ran,

Where she did show the dismal wound,

If any cure could there be found;

In tears she earnestly did cry,

Their skill to try, lest I should die.

The poison had begun to fly,

My hand, head, face swell'd dreadfully;

An old man took a razor keen,

The wounded place cut through the skin.

Blood, black as soot, did then appear,

Then came the same both fresh and clear;

Then milk and rinds of ash they found,

And wash'd, and rubb'd, and dress'd my wound.

The swelling then did soon abate,

And then my parents' joy was great;

A surgeon next the same did view,

Who said they'd done what's right and true.

Then physic next for me was brought,

Which soon a perfect cure wrought;

A purple mark doth always stand,

Upon the back of my right hand.

The urgent treatment Henry Quick received derived from the know how of folk lore. He was then visited by a surgeon, following which he took ‘physic’ or medicine. In rural and coastal Cornwall in the 1790s, domestic healthcare and folk lore practices continued alongside the presence of apothecaries and surgeons.

Introduction

Healthcare, intellectual enquiry, medicine, magic, and religion framed the human experience of ill health in Georgian Britain. A sick person might look to any or all of these for recovery, relief, or understanding. The shared experience was that there were few identified human interventions which could be consistently repeated or relied upon by those seeking to prevent or recover from sickness. One exception being the introduction of inoculation against smallpox.

Georgian Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly were in some ways unique, making them historically rewarding places for regional study. Alun Withey’s research on healthcare in Wales found that medical practice and new ideas reached into areas which had previously been seen as more reliant on family and folk lore traditions. Because Cornwall industrialised early, the same issues of cultural distinctiveness have not previously been considered. Great Cornish landowners, gentry, traders, mariners, soldiers, medical practitioners, and their patients travelled in Britain and beyond, influenced by and influencing the transmission of knowledge and ideas. In what follows, I consider for the first time the distinctive evidence of family and folk lore traditions in Georgian Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, which also does exist.

People experienced illness or injuries in specific locations and markets, within which the sick or injured person's options were determined by who was present in their locality and what they could afford. Family healthcare, incomes, reading, and self-help often influenced or determined decisions made by individuals. For the working poor, self-help was the main recourse. Family and folk lore traditions played a part in healthcare at home. Products pitched as remedies for common ailments, were promoted and retailed in fairs, shops, and newspapers, at a time when half the population could not read. Some workers and traders joined one of the many Cornish friendly societies, and received payments during times of sickness. Those who could afford to sometimes helped others directly with healthcare, or access to consultations and prescriptions.

Most healthcare in Georgian Cornwall was non-institutional. Within the poor law, Cornish parishes made arrangements for the sick, with accounts listing payments to apothecaries, and on occasions for necessaries and sick nursing outside the workhouse. Prisons appointed surgeons. In 1791, the physician Thomas Beddoes argued that, in Cornwall, a combination of distributed ‘Houses of Reception’ in mining districts, and dispensaries in towns, would provide the most effective access to medical treatment. As ‘Cornwall is rendered by its geography peculiarly unfit for an Infirmary’. Nonetheless, by the turn of the century, charitable and parish initiatives were developing new institutions. Truro infirmary was opened in 1799; and the Penzance dispensary opened a decade later. The County asylum was opened in Bodmin in 1818.

Prosperous Georgians travelled for their health, to receive fashionable spa treatments, or reside in beneficial climates. Great Cornish landowners and gentry travelled to Bath or London to consult physicians. On the highway, or coastal shipping lane, they may have passed those travelling in the opposite direction, on the advice of medical practitioners, to the relatively mild coastal climate and salt sea air of Cornwall.

This book explores place, the sick, and recovery in Georgian Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. It is inclusive of healthcare and medical traditions to which individuals might have looked at that time. Historical individuals who had knowledge or experience of one or more approach. And the ways in which women were participants in providing healthcare.

Some folk practices in healthcare were included in recorded folk lore, which identified women as well as men as astrologers, charmers, conjurors, or witches. Driven partly by the available historical sources, many of the examples here, of rural and coastal healthcare, are drawn from west Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly.

There is an established historical practice that it is reasonable to collectively identify physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries as 'medical practitioners' prior to professionalisation; to identify the producers and purveyors of proprietary preparations as 'quacks' regardless of their sincerity, training, or success