Skip to main content

Strange Carryings On

I’ve just read The Weekes Family Letters, the correspondence between Hampton Weekes (1780-1855) during his time as a student at St Thomas’s Hospital in 1801-2, to his family at Hurstpierpoint in Sussex. Hampton Weekes came from a medical family: his father and younger brother Dick were both doctors (surgeon-apothecaries). His Father Richard had studied at St Thomas’s before him, and Dick was due to study there when Hampton had finished. His mother was dead and his step-mother Elizabeth died in 1802. She brought with her a daughter, Fanny. Hampton also had two sisters, Mary Ann and Grace, who with their step-sister helped run the family’s medical practice.

Besides being illuminating about the practice of medicine and the attitudes and beliefs of eighteenth-century practitioners and patients, the letters give a vivid insight into the life of a close and affectionate family. (The exception is the step-mother, who the Weekes children were not particularly fond of.)  They share advice on what to wear, who to make friends with, medical case histories, and local gossip. They discuss the weather (the Thames is “frozen over in part” in January 1802), horses, tenants, the family business. Hampton’s father scolds him about overspending and going too often to the theatre. It’s the ordinariness of the letters that opens the family’s life up to you, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the detail of what they sent back and forth to one another by carrier.
 
While Hampton was in London he was given all sorts of commissions from his family, and “Knowles’s waggon” was kept busy transporting goods ranging from the homely to the bizarre. A new carpet for the best parlour “that will not show the Dirt”, a chamber-pot stand,  a sofa. Fish – not the sort people eat but counters for games – made of ivory, bone or mother of pearl, they came in various shapes, but fish-shaped ones were most popular.  

For his brother Dick, who was interested in mineralogy and botany, came fossils, shells, plant cuttings, the “snout of a sawfish” killed off the west coast of Africa, an elephant’s jaw, and “philosophical ink” – invisible ink. For his sisters fashion advice – ladies are wearing “hair tippets forming a triangle upon, or between ye. shoulders”.  Also for the girls lace, sheet music, and a shawl which they divided between them.
 
Food and drink featured a great deal. From London came a 60 pound-tub of “cambridge butter, excellent for toast”, a barrel of oysters which “I would advise you to eat the evening they arrive”, coconut, figs.  To London from the country came hares and pheasants, pears (“eat them as soon as ever they are ripe”), hogs pudding, sausages, apples, and empty barrels to be filled with porter and sent back.
 
Being a medical family, it’s only natural that Hampton was given orders for medicines and equipment. He sent James Powders, a thermometer, blister salve, forceps, scalpels. He also sent human body parts. Most of them were dissected and prepared by Hampton himself. A femur. A leg and foot – Hampton was going to throw them away but thought he might as well dissect them. An entire “Skelleton”. The testis of a London Bridge watchman – as this specimen was “offensive we could not keep it in the surgery”, Hampton’s father told him. A box of bones with instructions on macerating and bleaching them. The bones of a sailor aged about 30 who died from “inflamm. Of ye. Mucose membrane lining ye. Trachea”.   A stomach. To his friend William Borrer a female skeleton “by the Cobham stage” – what an image this conjures!  
 
Eighteenth-century carriers must have been a tolerant breed. Or perhaps they didn’t bother to enquire too closely about what was packed in the baskets and boxes they transported. Imagine the consequences of one of these packages being lost, stolen or falling off the back of the wagon, especially in an age when people detested dissection of corpses and riots against it were not unknown. I can’t imagine Royal Mail showing the same tolerance today!
 
A Medical Student at St Thomas’s Hospital, 1801-1902: The Weekes Family Letters, John M T Ford, (Medical History, Supplement No 7), (London, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1987).

 

 

 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dickens and Chickens

On 17 April 1860, in fields near Farnborough, Charles Dickens joined an audience amongst whom were the Prince of Wales and the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, as well as a number of MPs and clergymen, to watch the American John Carmel Heenan and England’s Tom Sayers (the Brighton Titch) beat one another blind and bloody in a bare-knuckle fight that lasted nearly two and a half hours. The fight ended in a draw when Aldershot police stormed the ring, forcing the fighters and their illustrious spectators to flee the scene. It was the brutality of this match that signalled an end to the bare-knuckle era and prompted the development of the Marquess of Queensberry’s rules. Dickens’s interest in pugilism was of long standing. In 1848 Dombey and Son , which had been published in serial form over the preceding two years, came out in book form. One of many of his novels that draws on the world of the prize fighter, it introduces the unforgettable Mr Toots, a would-be man about town, an...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Bristol Boys: The Bare Knuckle Champions and The Hatchet Inn

The Hatchet Inn on Frogmore Street in Bristol is all that remains of a row of seventeenth-century timbered houses dating back to 1606 – making it one of the city’s oldest pubs. It was substantially altered in the 1960s, and these days it stands on a traffic island. But at one time it boasted extensive grounds – and amongst the facilities on offer was a bare-knuckle boxing ring. Plaque at The Hatchet Inn, Bristol The pub’s connection with Bristol’s boxing heroes is commemorated in a plaque illustrating five of Bristol’s champions – one of whom, Hen Pearce, features in Bloodie Bones: A Dan Foster Mystery. Hen Pearce (Detail) Bristol born Hen Pearce, The Game Chicken (1777 – 1809), a former butcher’s boy, became champion of England in 1805. He was a hero inside and outside the ring. In 1807 he climbed onto the roof of a building in Thomas Street, Bristol to rescue a servant girl from a fire. Always a popular figure, this courageous act inspired many eulogies in pr...
Post a Comment
Read more

'We will have a fire': arson during eighteenth-century enclosures

Join our Winter Solstice Blog Hop! Thirty writers throw light on a dazzling range of topics . Follow the links at the end of this article to be enlightened and brightened by our blogs...  “Inclosure came and trampled on the grave Of labours rights and left the poor a slave And memorys pride ere want to wealth did bow Is both the shadow and the substance now.”    John Clare, The Mores     On 1 May 1794, the writer Hester (Thrale) Piozzi of Streatham Park recorded in her diary that the furze on the common had been set on fire in protest at the enclosure of land “which really & of just Right belonged to the poor of the Parish”. Yet even while she acknowledged that the protesters had justice on their side, she criticised them for not “going to Law like wise fellows” and concluded: “So senseless are Le Peuple , & so unfitted to be souverain”. The senseless poor of Streatham were not unique. During the eighteenth centu...
23 comments
Read more