Kicked by a horse

Tags

medicine, Postman's Park

When Joseph Boxall, a tallow chandler, and Jane, a tailoress, got married on 8 March 1857, her address was given as 14 Wageners Buildings (also spelled Wagners or Wagoners). They remained at that address as their children (Charles Henry Joseph, Joseph James, Louisa, Amelia, Sarah Anne, Charles Edwin Henry, Elizabeth Mary, James and John Federick) were all baptised from 14 Wageners Buildings at St. Mark’s Goodman’s Fields, and they were still there when the 1881 census was taken. Wageners Buildings could be found on Gower’s Walk. In 1883, the London, Tilbury and Southend Railway Company built a goods depot off Commercial Street, obliterating the east side of Gower’s Walk. I do not know whether Wageners Building was on the east side, but in 1891, the Boxall family could be found at 27 Tagg Street, so it is likely that they had to move because of the depot.

1894 Ordance Survey map

For this post we are concerned with daughter Elizabeth Mary, baptised on 15 January 1871. We do not know anything about her youth, but she may have attended the Free School in Gower’s Walk, which also had to relocate to make way for the goods depot. Elizabeth would in the normal course of her life have been unlikely to make the newspapers, but she jumped into the path of a runaway horse which threatened to harm a small child and the injuries she received unfortunately led to her death and an angry letter from the governor of London Hospital.

William J. Nixon, Governor of the hospital wrote to the editor of “Lloyd’s News” that his attention had been drawn to the report in the paper of the inquest into the death of Elizabeth Boxall where the allegation was made that she “was butchered in the London Hospital”. That was, according to Mr. Nixon, not true and he felt obliged to state the case from the point of view of the hospital.

The patient was admitted on the 9th of October last year for “contused thigh”. The history being that she had some time before been kloked by a horse and that the injured limb had been further damaged by a fall occurring on the day she was admitted to the hospital. The examination showed the previously unsuspected presence of cancerous disease. The swelling was full of blood, the thighbone was broken, and its ends destroyed by the disorder, and practically the only chance of stopping the spread of the malady was to perform amputation above the knee; and although the consent of the patient or the friends is always, as a rule, obtained in advance, it was decided, after consultation among those present, that immediate amputation was necessary. The case went on fairly well for some time; but by January 31st last there were evidences of the recurrence of the cancer, and it was deemed essential that the operation of amputation at the hip-joint should be performed. With the consent of the patient and her friends this was done. She then improved, and was sent to Folkestone at the expense of our Samaritan society, in charge of a special attendant. Here, however, symptoms were shown of the cancerous malady spreading to the lungs, and we were required to remove her, as being unsuited for residence in a convalescent home. The patient’s stay at Folkestone lasted from the 24th May to the 11th June. On the father’s return he came, I find, to the hospital, and, at his request, some strengthening medicine was given him for his daughter. We heard no more respecting the case until the account of the inquest appeared in the papers. Had any intimation of the coming inquest reached us the hospital would have been represented. The facts I have stated above would then have been in evidence, and the jury would have been able to form a clear opinion whether there was any ground for imputations of ill-treatment in the hospital, and whether a verdict of “Death from shock” after an operation performed upwards of four months previously, and followed by comparative convalescence, could possibly be a corrrect verdict.⁽¹⁾

Unfortunately, I have not been able to find the original report on the inquest that so enraged Mr. Nixon, but if he is correct in saying that the hospital knew nothing of the inquest, it is indeed strange that they were not asked to give evidence at the inquest. Whoever conducted the inquest should at least have given them the opportunity to state their case as they were accused of “butchering” a patient, a serious charge indeed. Poor Elizabeth may have died of cancer even if she had not jumped in front of a horse, but her brave act to save a child has given her a lasting memorial in Postman’s Park.

Postman’s Park

(1) Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper 1 July 1888.

Robert Clayton

Tags

medicine, philanthrophy

Portrait Clayton from Old and New London, vol. 1

Robert Clayton (1629-1707) came originally from Northamptonshire, but became an apprentice scrivener to his uncle in London. A scrivener can be described as a cross between a moneylender and a scribe, often acting as a broker or notary. After Clayton’s apprenticeship, he set up on his own and, together with a fellow apprentice, John Morris, took over his uncle’s bank. They renamed it Clayton & Morris Co. His uncle left him a fortune and when Morris died without issue, he also left a considerable sum to Clayton, so he became very wealthy. Clayton had a finger in many pies, first as Alderman of the Cheap Ward, as sheriff, as Lord Mayor, as MP, as colonel in the militia, as governor of the Bank of England and much more.

statue of Robert Clayton at St. Thomas’s Hospital

On 26 September, 1672, John Evelyn wrote in his Diary that he went to dinner at Sir Robert Clayton’s with Lord Howard and they had “a great feast” there. Clayton was at that time Sheriff of London and had just built himself a new house at 8 Old Jewry. Evelyn remarks that the house was “built indeed for a great magistrate, at excessive cost. The cedar dining-room is painted with the history of the Giants’ War, incomparably done by Mr. Streeter, but the figures are too near the eye”. A few years later Clayton bought an estate at Marden, Godstone, Surrey, from a kinsman of Evelyn. They travelled together to Clayton’s new home on 12 October 1677 where Evelyn saw that Clayton had transformed “a despicable farm-house […] into a seat with extraordinary expense”. Evelyn’s description gives us a good idea of Clayton’s house and grounds:

The gardens are large, and well-walled […] The barnes, & the stacks of corn, the stalls for cattle, pigeon-house, &c. of most laudable example. Innumerable are the plantations of trees, especially walnuts. The orangery and gardens are very curious. In the house are large and noble rooms. He and his lady (who is very curious in distillery) entertained me three or four days very freely. […] This place is exceedingly sharp in the winter, by reason of the serpentining of the hills: and it wants running water; but the solitude much pleased me. All the ground is so full of wild thyme, marjoram, and other sweet plants, that it cannot be over-stocked with bees; I think he had near forty hives of the industrious insect.

Clayton’s house at Old Jewry ©British Museum

Clayton’s house at Marden Park (Source: Grosvenor Prints)

Clayton did use his wealth for numerous good causes and he was a major benefactor of Christ’s and St. Thomas’s Hospitals, but it is for the latter that he is probably best remembered. Thomas’s Hospital was first located in Southwark, but in the 1680s, it was considered to be in such a state of dilapidation that patching up was not an option and a complete re-building was envisaged. Funds were, however, a problem. A subscription scheme was set up in 1693. Clayton contributed £600 towards the rebuilding and was later to endow the hospital in his will with a further £2300. But Clayton was not the only major benefactor: Thomas Guy and Thomas Frederick paid for wards to be put up, Sir John Wolfe gave fifty pounds and portraits of the King and Queen, Thomas Gudden gave reading desks and bibles for the patients, Captain John Howard paid for the interior of the chapel, and many lesser-known people gave sums between 10 and 100 pounds. And money kept flowing in even after the new hospital had been built. Benjamin Golding gives a complete list of benefactors in his book on the history of the hospital.⁽¹⁾

Site of St. Thomas’s Hospital in Southwark on Horwood’s map of 1799

In 1701 (Matthews says 1702), a statue of Clayton was erected in the square built at his expense. According to Golding, it had Clayton’s arms on the south side of the pedestal and a – rather wordy – inscription on the north side. The statue had been ordered from Grinling Gibbons, although it was possibly made by his workshop rather than by the artist himself.⁽²⁾ By order of the Governors of the hospital, the inscription was altered slightly in 1714 when the statue was “beautified and improved” “as a compliment to his virtues and to perpetuate his memory”. In 1862, a compulsorily purchase order had forced the hospital to make way for the Charing Cross Railway viaduct. It temporarily moved to Newington until, in 1871, the new building further west along the Thames at Lambeth was opened. Fortunately for us, the hospital had the sense to take Clayton’s statue with them when they moved from Southwark to Lambeth. The right hand and scroll are replacements to rectify the damage done by a medical student climbing the statue when drunk.⁽³⁾ The statue itself was moved several times, but since 2000, it stands in a small garden in a quiet corner of the hospital grounds, close to the river.

(1) Benjamin Golding, An Historical Account of St. Thomas’s Hospital, Southwark (1819).
(2) Peter Matthews, London’s Statues and Monuments (2012), p. 187.
(3) Matthews, p. 188.

Casualty on the ward

Tags

medicine, Postman's Park

As the Resident Medical Officer at Middlesex Hospital, William Freer Lucas M.R.C.S.Eng., L.R.C.P. Lond., although just 23 years old, was responsible for the medical procedures in the wards on that fatal day in October 1893, and when a child with diphtheria needed a tracheotomy, it was his job to perform the operation. When he was administering chloroform, mucus from the child landed on his face, either because the child sneezed or in some other way during the procedure, and from that Lucas became infected with the disease. He died four days later on the 8th of October.

The newspaper reports of his death all praise William for continuing with the operation without stopping to wipe off the mucus and putting the patient before his own well-being. The Hampshire advertiser gave “all honour to our hospitals that they are full of men [no mention of women!] ready to run such risks for the saving of life and the relief of pain. Their heroism is seldom recognised […] but when such a record as this does reach us we pay eager tribute to its nobility”.⁽¹⁾ There is a lot to be said for surgical masks!

Middlesex Hospital emblem

The British Medical Journal included an obituary from which we learn that Lucas was officially styled ‘Casualty Medical Officer’ and had studied and worked at the Middlesex Hospital since 1888.⁽²⁾ Before that, he had attended the Royal Medical Benevolent College at Epsom, which was founded in 1855 to provide education for the sons of medical practitioners. Later, children from different backgrounds were admitted.⁽³⁾

William Freer’s father, William Lucas, was a farmer who employed 11 men and 2 boys on his 420 acre Sussex farm.⁽⁴⁾ William Freer had a number of brothers and sisters, and one of them, Richard Clement (born 1873), also went to Epsom College, even becoming assistant master there and later headmaster at Seabright’s, Wolverley. Another Richard Clement (1846-1915), probably William Freer’s uncle on his father’s side, had a distinguished career at Guy’s Hospital and became Fellow of the College of Surgeons.⁽⁵⁾

A College letterhead in the mid-1860s (Source: Epsom College Archive)

But back to our hero: William Freer was baptised on 25 September, 1870 at St. Andrew’s Church, Grafham, Sussex, as the son of William and Miriam Lucas. The church record does not say exactly when he was born, but Epsom College Archive could tell me that his date of birth was 24 August, 1870.⁽⁶⁾ He was buried on 13 October, 1893 at Shamley Green, Guildford.⁽⁷⁾ Why there is unclear; as far as I have managed to find out, his family had no ties there. The burial list for 1881-1900 does not mention another Lucas, but there may have been a link on his mother’s side. In his memory, his parents endowed the Freer Lucas Scholarship for students of Epsom College. The scholarship is awarded annually on the nomination of the headmaster.⁽⁸⁾

Who the child that Lucas treated was, whether it survived, what its name was, or even if it was a girl or a boy remains a mystery.

plaque in Postman’s Park for William Freer Lucas

Postman’s Park

(1) The Hampshire advertiser, 18 Oct. 1893.
(2) The British Medical Journal, 28 Oct. 1893. online here.
(3) William Freer’s achievements as a scholar at Epsom were: “prefect. Rugby XV. Cricket XI. Brande G.C. and Wakley Prizes” (Source: Epsom medical biographies 1855-1889.
(4) Census 1881: Moor Farm House, Petworth, Sussex.
(5) The British Medical Journal, 10 July 1915. online here.
(6) Thanks to Alan Scadding, the archivist at The Royal Medical Foundation of Epsom College, for supplying the date of birth and for supplying the link in note 3.
(7) Register supplied by wonershchurchorg.uk, online here.
(8) The Medical Press and Circular, 13 September 1916, p 237.

The Weeping Monument of Edward Cooke

Tags

Cromwell, Ireland, medicine, St. Bartholomew-the-Great

Many tourists have walked past the grand porch of St. Bartholomew-the-Great on the corner of West Smithfield and Little Britain, perhaps on their way to the Victorian pile of Smithfield market, but very few tourists take the trouble to go through the arch, along the path and into the church. What now appears to be a separate porch used to be the west front of the actual church. The church itself was part of the monastery of the Augustinian Canons and much larger than it is today, but in 1539, the nave was destroyed as the result of Henry VIII’s Dissolution. The rest of the church was allowed to remain as a parish church and what is now the path from the porch to the church door used to be – roughly – the south aisle of the nave.

Once inside, the hustle and bustle of the street is no longer to be heard and one can pretend to be back in 1652 when the stone monument for Edward Cooke was erected. It is attributed to Thomas Burman (1617/18–1674)⁽¹⁾ and known as the ‘weeping statue’, because the moisture in the atmosphere used to be soaked up by the soft marble and miraculously released again as ‘tears’ from time to time. Alas, the Victorians installed a radiator under the monument which put a stop to the moisture releasing properties of the stone, so no more miracle.
Under the effigy is a tablet with the text:

Hic inhvmatvm svccvbat, qvantvm terrestre: viri
Vere venerandi, Edwardi Cooke Philosophi
Apprime docti nec non Medici spectatissimi
Qvi tertio Idvs Avgvsti Anno Dom. 1652.
Annoq[ue] ætatis 39, certa resvrgendi spe
(vtinecesse) natvræ concessit.

Or in English: Here lies interred all that is mortal of a truly reverend man, Edward Cooke, an exceedingly learned Philosopher as well as a very notable man of medicine, who, on the third of the ides [the 11th] of August A.D. 1652, and in the 39th year of his age, yielded perforce to nature in the sure hope of a resurrection.⁽²⁾
A second text on the plaque refers to the weeping nature of the stone:

Vnsluce yo^r briny floods, what can yee keepe
Yo^r eyes from teares, & see the marble weepe
Burst out for shame: or if yee find noe vent
For teares, yet stay, and see the stones relent.

Edward Cooke

Despite the fact that Edward died relatively young at 39 years of age, he had amassed a reasonable amount of property. He had lands in Lincolnshire which were given to him by his father-in-law Timothy Wade at the time of his marriage.⁽³⁾ The combined coats of arms of the Cooke and Wade families can be seen under the tablet referring to the statue’s moisture properties. Edward owned a property in Lime Street, presumably that was were he lived, and he had property in Friday Street which was rented out.
He also had shares in ‘bills of Ireland’, a scheme put forward by the Cromwellian Parliament to anglicize Ireland in order to control the stubborn Irish who did not want to accept English rule. Every person who contributed to the scheme was to receive land, estates or manors according to their contribution, or ‘adventure’ as it was also called. The subscription began in 1642, but it took till 1653 for the lands to be given out, so Edward Cooke never reaped the rewards himself. He had inherited his shares from his father, also Edward, an apothecary who died in 1644, and from his brother John, who died later that same year.⁽⁴⁾ Edward Cooke senior also invested in the Massachusetts Company and even sent his other son Robert, whom he had trained to be an apothecary, across the Atlantic. Edward senior had invested 100 pounds for which Robert was given the right to 800 acres of land in the new colony.⁽⁵⁾

Edward was baptised on 14 November 1613 at St. Dionis Backchurch, and became, as the monument in St. Barts already states, a medical man, consistently described as ‘Doctor of Physick’ in the parish registers. J. Venn’s Alumni Cantabrigienses (1922) lists him as entering Sidney College, Cambridge at the age of 17 on 22 Oct. 1630. He received his M.A. in 1638 and his M.D. in 1644. In between his M.A. and his M.D., he went abroad – not unusual for well-to-do Englishmen – to broaden his experience and to study at other European universities. We find Edward at Leyden registering himself on the 1st of June, 1639 and at Padua in October 1641.⁽⁶⁾

Edward died the 11th of August 1652 and was buried at St. Barts on the 14th; he left a wife and two children. He had married Mary Wade on 9 December 1645 at St. Helen Bishopsgate and four sons were born during the marriage, but two died young.⁽⁷⁾ Edward left most of his wealth to his wife and on her death to his sons, first to Edward and if he should die before his wife, to Robert.

(1) http://www.churchmonumentssociety.org and A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain, 1660-1851 (http://217.204.55.158/henrymoore/index.php)
(2) ‘Monuments, memorials and heraldry’, The records of St. Bartholomew’s priory [and] St. Bartholomew the Great, West Smithfield: volume 2 (1921), pp. 449-487.
(3) PROB 11/224/348.
(4) John Prendergast, Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (1870) and John Pentland Mahaffey, Irish State Papers 1641 to 1659, vol. 4 (1903).
(5) Letters of 1638 and 1649 from Edward Cooke to John Wintrop in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1863, p. 381-384.
(6) Album studiosorum Academiae Lugduno Batavae MDLXXV-MDCCCLXXV, compiled by W.N. Du Rieu, 1875 and www.rcpe.ac.uk/library/read/people/english-students/
(7) Baptism and burial register of St. Helen’s Bishopsgate: baptised 23 Oct. 1646 Edward (buried 21 Nov. 1646); baptised 16 Nov. 1647 Edward; baptised 19 Feb. 1650 Timothy (buried 12 Aug. 1650); also mentioned in the will is a son Robert, but I have not found a record of his baptism.