5 - Healthways and Two Eighteenth-Century Devonshire Estates

Summary

5.1 Introduction

The disastrous effects of such eighteenth-century scourges as smallpox and other infectious conditions are commonly noted in general accounts of the 1700s. In contrast, the snapshots of health and illness found in the Drake letters focus more on self-limiting and chronic illnesses, albeit with hovering fears of life-threatening situations. Thus Nicholas Rowe wrote to Sir Francis on 9 June 1752:

I found [Mr Porter] a Bed under a Surgeon's operation; his Malady proceeded from a pimple which rose in his seat after Riding, it turn’d to a Boil, which encreas’d to the Bredth of one's Hand & (F226)

In weaving together excerpts from the letters with background notes, this account considers: home care and choices of practitioners; maintaining personal health; some specific medical conditions; and treatments. In so doing, a key consideration is an individual's approach to health, thus adding to the growing historical literature that focuses on patients’ attitudes, beliefs, and practices that are not necessarily time-bound.

Additionally, the letters from the apothecary William Hudson spotlight the intriguing transition of apothecaries to general medical practitioners, while those from Nicholas Rowe prompt questions as to whether the quality of medical care and the impact of illness on business and society in rural Britain differed significantly from London and other growing urban areas. Even though Rowe's letters offer no specific answers, the context of a rural–urban divide, seen as a growing issue in the 1700s, should be borne in mind. It was even reflected in the opening lines of the poet-physician Mark Akenside's ‘Ode to Sir Francis Henry Drake, Baronet’:

I.

Behold! the Balance in the sky

Swift on the wintry scale inclines:

To earthy caves the Dryads fly,

And the bare pastures Pan resigns.

Late did the farmer's fork o’erspread

With recent soil the twice-mown mead,

Tainting the bloom which autumn knows:

He whets the rusty coulter now,

He binds his oxen to the plough,

And wide his future harvest throws.

II.

Now, London's busy confines round,

By Kensington's imperial tow’rs,

From Highgate's rough descent profound,

Essexian heaths, or Kentish bow’rs,

Where’er I pass, I see approach

Some rural statesman's eager coach …