Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

MEDICAL PRACTICE IN BUCKDEN: 1253 TO 1964 179 CHAPTER 14/ MEDICAL PRACTICE IN BUCKDEN: 1253 TO 1964 William Tackaberry This chapter looks at some of the doctors (all, as it happens, male) who have looked after the wellbeing of Buckden’s residents through the centuries; but it is dedicated to the women of the village. Long before organised health care became the norm, the inherited wisdom of generations of nurses, midwives and mothers was at the community’s disposal. It is the fate of such women to be largely anonymous: they were not listed in trade directories (unlike the doctors, many of whom rose up the social ladder into the ‘county’ list); they—or more probably their husbands or fathers— rarely drew attention to their skills when completing census returns. NB ‘(q.v.)’ after a name or place indicates that more information may be found in the A to Z Section. The early years t seems unlikely now that we shall ever know who was Buckden’s first resident physician. Many of the bishops of Lincoln would doubtless have had skilled healers among their entourages, whose services might have been available beyond the great man’s household. But they could hardly be regarded as the village doctor. To start with, therefore, is a selection of some of the few medical men known to have been associated with Buckden, albeit briefly. John de St Giles ( fl. 13thC) , a Dominican friar, physician and divine, was summoned to Buckden in the late summer of 1253 to attend his friend Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln, then in his final illness. He was able to offer the dying man both physical and spiritual comfort, the latter in the form of vigorous debates about the shortcomings—as the bishop saw them—of John’s order. These so engaged bishop Robert’s interest that he survived until October. Mr Richard Scrafton and Dr Monro were London physicians who were sent to Buckden in the week beginning 4 July 1737 to try to save the life of Thomas Jackson, Town Clerk to the City of London, who was lying at death’s door at the George. A large, fat man, Jackson had been travelling up the Great North Road when he had an apoplectic fit after the weight of his body bouncing up and down in the carriage burst open a recently healed wound. 1 Neither the surgeon or the doctor could save him and he died at eleven o’clock in the evening on Wednesday, 6 July. The news reached London before nine the next morning, to the delight of the many candidates waiting to put themselves forward for his job. Lawrence Desborough , ‘late of Bugden’, announced in a 1754 London newspaper advertisement that he and Edward Davis of Huntingdon had entered into practice together in the ‘Several Branches of Surgery, Midwifry, and Pharmacy, [and] hope for the Continuance of all our Friends Favours’. They were setting up shop in Huntingdon, but the wording of the notice suggests that Desborough may already have been practising in Buckden. A family of that name was present in the village throughout the eighteenth century, and he may be the Lawrence Desborough who was baptised in St Mary’s in October 1725. Other doctors appear briefly in the Churchwardens’ Accounts (see appendix to Chapter 5). They include Dr Mackie, Surgeon and Apothecary of Huntingdon, in 1800 and Mr Benjamin Roberts, Surgeon and Apothecary of Buckden, in 1802. From about 1820, however, rather more information becomes available about the men—and it was only men for nearly the next 150 years—who ministered to the village’s medical needs. The nineteenth century The first of these was Henry Waller, MRCS LSA (1787-1873) , a rarity in that he was a Huntingdonshire man, born in Hartford. His headstone in St Mary's churchyard tells us that he was ‘many 1 He had been paying his compliments to some ladies in a coach when they unfortunately ran over his leg. I