ortunate that other exploits of these physicians and surgeons,
not involving Captain Smith--or the stingray--did not cause him to make
a record. Dr. Lawrence Bohun, however, who accompanied Lord De la Warr
to the colony in 1610, evoked comments of a more general nature in the
accounts of contemporaries.

Dr. Bohun ministered to the settlers who had been ready to abandon
Jamestown in 1610. A letter from the governor and council to the London
Company, July 7, 1610, describes his problems and his efforts to meet
them. Insomuch as the letter gives one of the fullest accounts of early
Jamestown medical practices and because Bohun is one of the most
renowned of seventeenth-century Virginia physicians, it deserves a
lengthy quotation:

Mr. Dr. Boone [Bohun] whose care and industrie for the preservation
of our men's lives (assaulted with strange fluxes and agues), we
have just cause to commend unto your noble favours; nor let it, I
beseech yee, be passed over as a motion slight and of no moment to
furnish us with these things ... since we have true experience how
many men's lives these physicke helpes have preserved since our
coming, God so blessing the practise and diligence of our doctor,
whose store has nowe growne thereby to so low an ebb, as we have
not above 3 weekes phisicall provisions; if our men continew still
thus visited with the sicknesses of the countrie, of the which
every season hath his particular infirmities reigning in it, as we
have it related unto us by the old inhabitants; and since our owne
arrivall, have cause to feare it to be true, who have had 150 at a
time much afflicted, and I am perswaded had lost the greatest part
of them, if we had not brought these helpes with us.

Dr. Bohun sought medical supplies from abroad, but he also experimented
with indigenous natural matter such as plants and earths in an effort
to replenish his dwindling supplies and to discover natural products of
value in the New World. Judging by a contemporary account, Bohun,
professionally trained in the Netherlands, used drugs therapeutically
according to the conventional theories of the humoral school. Despite
the disfavor in which frequent purgings are held today, it must be
allowed that those being treated then sounded a plaintive call for more
of Bohun's "physicke."

The colony lost his services when he left to accompany Lord De la Warr
to the West Indies. His co