THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 7, 1996 TAG: 9607050231
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: GEORGE TUCKER
LENGTH: 71 lines
Norfolk's medical history, the 1870 to 1996 phase of which was recently featured in a special edition of The Virginian-Pilot celebrating the 125th anniversary of the Norfolk Academy of Medicine, actually began one year after the settlement of Jamestown. In July 1608, Anthony Bagnall, the surgeon of Capt. John Smith's second Chesapeake Bay expedition and the first known medical man to visit the Norfolk area, helped explore the Elizabeth River with the Smith party to about where Sentara Norfolk General Hospital now dominates the skyline.
Following Bagnall's brief visit, Norfolk's medical history is vague for the next half century since the area was still virgin forest with few white inhabitants.
When Norfolk was established as a town in the 1680s, however, the picture changed. Increasingly medical men, many of them former ship surgeons, began taking up permanent residence in the area.
By the beginning of the 18th century, ``Norfolk Towne'' had become Virginia's chief center for imported drugs and other medical supplies.
It had also attracted any number of European-trained resident physicians, some of whom had served in the Royal Navy. Among these was Dr. Archibald Campbell who not only practiced here before 1750, but also operated Norfolk's first known drug store.
Unfortunately, Campbell ran afoul of most of the town's population in 1768, when he tried to introduce the crude type of smallpox inoculation then in vogue at a time when the disease was responsible for more deaths here per annum than any other.
Believing Campbell's vaccinations spread rather than hindered the disease, a Norfolk mob not only forced his gravely ill patients to flee to a pest house outside the town's limits, it also torched his home and medical store.
Apart from the annual inroads of smallpox in pre-Revolutionary Norfolk, the borough was also periodically plagued with cholera, malaria and yellow fever.
Even so, by 1776, Norfolk was well supplied with doctors who kept these outbreaks under partial control. Some of these doctors were Tories and moved away after the town was destroyed by the British and Virginia forces in January 1776. But many Norfolk physicians were also Revolutionary patriots and served with distinction in the Virginia Navy and Continental forces.
With the return of peace, Norfolk again became an important Virginia medical center. Notable among the borough's doctors during that period were Dr. James Taylor and Dr. John K. Read. Both men also served as mayors of Norfolk and their handsome marble tombstones can still be seen in the graveyard of St. Paul's Episcopal church in downtown Norfolk.
By 1812, enough competent physicians had taken up residence in Norfolk to merit the suggestion that a medical school be established here.
But even though it was widely advertised, nothing came of it. Still, that did not prevent most of the borough's physicians from organizing a society a few years later. This is proven by the fact that an 1851 national medical journal reported that Norfolk was then one of the five Virginia cities where such societies were active.
By 1855, when the worst yellow fever epidemic in the city's history broke out, it was generally believed that the resident medical body could cope with it. Since even the most learned medical men throughout the world were then unaware of what caused the disease, however, Norfolk's doctors were helpless when the epidemic struck.
The ``Death Storm'' began on June 7, 1855, when the the steamer Ben Franklin, en route to New York from St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands where the fever was raging, put into Hampton Roads in distress. Her hold, containing the larvae of the deadly yellow fever transmitting mosquito, Aedes aegypti, was a Pandora's Box of pestilential evil.
The details of the 1855 epidemic during which around 2,000 died are too well known to go into here. But it should never be forgotten that despite great personal risk, Norfolk's medical body remained in the city and did everything in its power to combat the dread disease.
Notable among these dedicated physicians, were Dr. William Selden and Dr. Herbert Nash. They not only survived, but helped found the Norfolk County Medical Society, now the Norfolk Academy of Medicine, in 1870. by CNB