Pills, Shocks & Jabs
An eighteenth century pioneer of jabs against smallpox; a great reformer in the often brutal treatment of mental illness; an amateur GP who gave away free pills to the poor. They were all prominent doctors in Bristol 200 years ago - and all were Quakers.
These religious dissenters formed a tiny and repressed minority in the city’s population, yet flourished in medicine.
The untold story of how they did it is revealed in a new book by Peter Cullimore. It’s called ‘Pills, Shocks & Jabs - the Remarkable Dissenting Doctors of Georgian Bristol’ and published by Bristol Books.
The Quaker chocolate manufacturer Joseph Fry began his career as a trained medical practitioner. At his apothecary’s shop in the old city he started making chocolate to improve his patients’ health.
Fry and his wife Anna were at the heart of a local religious and social community, united by shared moral values and a desire to help each other, especially the sick and needy.
From this background emerged characters like Dr Abraham Ludlow. He was a Quaker physician with family and professional links to Dr Edward Jenner, developer of the first vaccine. Ludlow was one of the first to introduce free vaccinations for the poor in Bristol.
Ludlow’s friends included a highly unusual medical partnership of husband and wife, John and Ann Till Adams. They were fellow Quakers, running an early version of a pharmacy together.
John was widely admired as an all-round medic, trained in surgery and even midwifery, as well as in dispensing medicines. Ann learned from him so well that she later opened her own chemist’s shop in Union Street and also treated patients herself, with great success. She achieved this despite being barred from formal medical training because she was a woman.
Ann’s own family, a branch of the Frys, were related by marriage to another Quaker, the amateur doctor and philanthropist Shurmer Bath. He was a maltster by trade but also practised as an untrained doctor, best known for dispensing his own pills free of charge. Shurmer and other Bristol practitioners also experimented with electric shock treatment on some of their patients.
It was a rich melting pot of Quaker doctors who all knew and helped each other, overcoming prejudice against religious dissenters by mutual co-operation. Quakers were barred from politics and the military, but could thrive in business and medicine.
One who combined both was an early psychiatrist, Dr Edward Long Fox. He ploughed his wealth from industrial investments and treating mental illness into building a state-of-the-art asylum, or “madhouse”, just outside Bristol. Dr Fox designed Brislington House himself to care for “lunatics” in a humane environment, instead of the brutal conditions that were the norm.
‘Pills, Shocks & Jabs’ links all these stories and more into a gripping narrative thread. The book also draws parallels between the smallpox pandemic of the 1700s and the modern battle against Covid-19.
Peter Cullimore’s previous book, ‘Saints, Crooks & Slavers’, was published by Bristol Books in May 2020. Both titles, priced at £12, are non-profit. Copies are available from independent book shops, or directly from the publishers via their online shop at www.bristolbooks.org
