of King Philip's
War the Council of Connecticut paid Mrs. Allyn L20 for her services to
the sick, and Mistress Sarah Sands doctored on Block Island. Sarah
Alcock, the wife of a chirurgeon, was also "active in physick;" and
Mistress Whitman, the Marlborough midwife, visited her patients on
snow-shoes, and lived to be seventy-eight years old, too. In the Phipps
Street Burying Ground in Charlestown is the tombstone of a Boston
midwife who died in 1761, aged seventy-six years, and who, could we
believe the record on the gravestone, "by ye blessing of God has brought
into this world above 130,000 children." But a close examination shows
that the number on the ancient headstone, through the mischievous
manipulation of modern hands, has received a figure at either end, and
the good old lady can only be charged with three thousand additions to
wretched humanity.

Negroes, and illiterate persons of all complexions, set up as doctors.
Old Joe Pye and Sabbatus were famous Indian healers. Indian squaws, such
as Molly Orcutt, sold many a decoction of leaves and barks to the
planters, and, like Hiawatha,

"Wandered eastward, wandered westward,
Teaching men the use of simples,
And the antidotes for poisons,
And the cure of all diseases."

A good old Connecticut doctor had a negro servant, Primus, who rode with
him and helped him in his surgery and shop. When the master died, Doctor
Primus started in to practise medicine himself, and proved
extraordinarily successful throughout the county; even his master's
patients did not disdain to employ the black successor, wishing no doubt
their wonted bolus and draught.

In spite of the fact that everyone and anyone seemed to be permitted,
and was considered fitted to prescribe medicine, the colonists were
sharp enough on the venders of quack medicines--or, perhaps I should
say, of powerless medicines--on "runnagate chyrurgeons and
physickemongers, saltimbancoes, quacksalvers, charlatans, and all
impostourous empiricks." As early as 1631, one Nicholas Knapp was fined
and whipped for pretending "to cure the scurvey by a water of noe worth
nor value which he sold att a very deare rate." The planters were
terribly prostrated by scurvy, and doubtless were specially indignant at
this heartless cheat.

Tides of absurd attempts at medicine, or rather at healing, swept over
the scantily settled New England villages in colonial days, just as we
have seen in our own day, in our