THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 10, 1995 TAG: 9512080619
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: GEORGE TUCKER
LENGTH: Medium: 76 lines
Dr. John Craik, one of the three physicians who attended George Washington at the time of his death on Dec. 14, 1799, practiced medicine briefly in Norfolk before the American Revolution. Craik and the other physicians - Gustavas Brown and Elisha Cullen Dick - were personal friends of Washington.
Craik was a native of Scotland, where his father had an estate on which the father of John Paul Jones, the American naval hero (``I have just begun to fight''), was a gardener. After finishing his medical studies in Edinburgh, Craik emigrated to the West Indies. From there he set out in the 1750s for Norfolk, where he practiced until he became a medical officer in the Virginia forces during the French and Indian War.
When British Gen. Edward Braddock was mortally wounded in July 1755, Craik attended him. Later, when Washington was made commander-in-chief of the Virginia forces, Craik became his chief medical officer. From then on, he and Washington were fast friends and served together during the American Revolution. When Washington became president, he recommended him for government-oriented medical services.
Washington regarded Craik so highly he remembered him in his will thus: ``To my compatriot in arms, and old and intimate friend, Dr. Craik, I give my bureau (or, as the cabinet makers call it, tambour secretary), and the circular chair, an appendage of my study.'' Today, both pieces of furniture are among the treasures of Mount Vernon.
Brown, a son of a Scottish immigrant physician, was also a prominent medical man in Virginia and Maryland. Like Craik, he studied medicine in Edinburgh, after which he ``walked the hospitals'' in London to gain practical experience before returning to America. Later he was preceptor for many Virginia medical students and his abilities were so highly regarded by Washington he included him in the trio of doctors he summoned shortly before his death.
Of the three physicians, Dick was closest to Washington and was a highly picturesque character. Unlike Craik and Brown, he received his medical training in Philadelphia, after which he settled in Alexandria where he became professionally successful and socially prominent.
Like Washington and many other leaders of the Age of Enlightenment, Dick was an ardent Mason. He helped organize the Alexandria Masonic Lodge and served as its Worshipful Master before and after Washington's funeral at Mount Vernon.
A tall, handsome and courtly man, Dick was much addicted during his prime to fine clothes and wore his powdered hair in a queue tied with a flaring ribbon bow. He was also famous for his sumptuous dinner parties to which his fortunate guests were always invited with an original poem of his own composition. One of these has been preserved. It reads:
If you can eat a good fat duck,
Come up with us and take pot luck.
Of white-backs we have got a pair,
So plump, so round, so fat, so fair,
An (sic) London alderman would fight,
Through pies and tarts, to get one bite.
Moreover we have beef and pork,
That you may use your knife and fork.
Come up precisely at two o'clock,
The door shall open at your knock.
The day 'tho wet, the streets 'tho muddy,
To keep out the cold, we'll have some toddy.
And if perchance you should get sick,
You'll have at hand, Yours, E.C. Dick.
Before his death in 1825, however, Dick gradually curtailed his earlier conviviality. This is how the Dictionary of American Biography describes his latter years:
``An accomplished musician and in early life a believer in and attendant at duels, Dick later changed his church affiliation from Episcopalian to Presbyterian and then to Quaker, threw his dueling pistols into the river, destroyed as a useless vanity an organ which he had built, and otherwise took a more serious view of life and eternity.'' by CNB