  The fourth named practicer, George Gilmer, Sr., deserves extended attention. He comes as close as any one person to being a typical Williamsburg apothecary-surgeon-physician of his time, though his extramedical career was far from typical. Born in Edinburgh in 1700, Gilmer studied medicine there, then practiced with one of London’s leading doctors, whose daughter he married. Possibly the death of his young wife moved him to ship for America; at the age of 31 he arrived in Virginia to practice medicine and manage the affairs of a land company. He married again and must have prospered, because in four years’ time he was able to purchase for £155 three choice lots near the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg. These three lots, on which the rambling St. George Tucker House has stood since 1788, were described in 1735 as “the Lotts and Land whereon the Bowling Green formerly was, the Dwelling House and Kitchen of William Levingston and the House call’d the Play House.” The last, of course, was the first theater in the English colonies, and Gilmer later sold it to the mayor and aldermen of Williamsburg to be used as a city hall and courthouse. It was a particularly convenient arrangement for one of the aldermen who was to become mayor himself a year later, none other than Dr. George Gilmer. Gilmer’s career as an apothecary-surgeon-physician was not without its ups and downs. Soon after buying the property on Palace Green, he was giving away samples of rattlesnake root on behalf of Dr. John Tennent, who maintained it would cure pleurisy, the gout, rheumatism, and mad-dog bites. At the same time the Virginia Gazette, Williamsburg’s new weekly, carried the news that “on Monday Morning last, dy’d, at Mr. Geo. Gilmer’s, in this City, Mrs. Susanna Skaife, ... and was decently interr’d on Wensday. And, on Thursday Morning also dy’d, the Rev. Mr. John Skaife, her Husband, after a tedious Indisposition.” It would appear that at least Mrs. Skaife was a bed patient in Dr. Gilmer’s home; this was a usual way of caring for serious illnesses before the day of hospitals. Surrounded by the equipment of his craft, this young apothecary is making up a prescription of some kind, probably for pills. The illustration traces back to a London publication, The Book of Trades or Library of Useful Arts, first American edition published in 1807 by J. Johnson and for sale in his bookstore in Philadelphia and in Richmond, Virginia. Soon thereafter, Gilmer found it necessary to insert the following advertisement in the Virginia Gazette:
Nine years later Gilmer was so much alive and active as to be mayor of the city, the owner of a new four-wheeled chaise, and once more a bridegroom. On the death of his second wife, Gilmer had promptly married his next-door neighbor. The third Mrs. Gilmer was Harrison Blair, daughter of Dr. Archibald Blair and sister of the Hon. John Blair of the governor’s council. The apothecary’s star was rising. He was still, of course, a shopkeeper. His “Old Shop near the Governor’s” stood at the very edge of Palace Green, a frame building of about 20 feet square. Every year or so he advertised the arrival from England of a shipment of drugs, medicines, spices, and groceries—to be sold at the shop, wholesale or retail, and at reasonable rates. Archaeological excavations on the site of the first theater, and extending north of it onto the adjacent Brush-Everard House property, yielded quantities of Dr. Gilmer’s domestic and pharmaceutical rubbish. The latter included delftware ointment pots and drug jars, glass medicine phials and fragments of carboys, bottles for Pyrmont mineral water, a brass pestle, and, inexplicably, a human jaw. Just how, or if, that related to Gilmer’s shop remains open to conjecture, but it is evident from the quantity of pharmaceutical artifacts recovered that Dr. Gilmer’s business was as extensive as his 1737 advertisement claimed. Indeed, Gilmer was no ordinary shopkeeper. His social status—doubtless bolstered by that of his wife’s family—was great enough that he could be among the first to entertain the newly appointed Governor Dinwiddie. One suspects that either the ambitious Dr. Gilmer or his well-born wife decided that his house on Palace Street fell short of such prestigious demands. Six months after the dinner for Dinwiddie, the apothecary was having his dining room wainscoted, with a marble fireplace, a mirror over the mantel, and a cabinet to contain the set of new china his wife had ordered from London. About the same time Dr. Gilmer, who gave himself perhaps facetiously the title of “colonel,” became part owner of the Raleigh Tavern. The deed by which he and Colonel Chiswell bought the famous inn for £700 testified that he had gained that ultimate accolade of social and economic status in colonial Virginia, the designation “Geo Gilmer Gent.” In the letters he wrote to London, Gilmer seems to refer to himself not as a doctor or surgeon, but as an apothecary, and his name in public documents as well as in private records most often appears not as Dr. Gilmer but as Mr. Gilmer. He was doubtless prouder of being known as a gentleman and a colonel; the title of doctor was often held in poor esteem. William Byrd II wrote in 1706 that “here be some men indeed that are call’d Doctors: but they are generally discarded Surgeons of Ships, that know nothing above the very common Remedys.” As late as 1783 Dr. Johann Schoepf, writing of his travels through the former colonies, asserted that “in America every man who drives the curing trade is known without distinction as Doctor, as elsewhere every person who makes verses is a poet—so there are both black doctors and brown, and quacks in abundance.” |
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