DR. BENJAMIN ALLEN, OF BRAINTREE.
5
before he could return him on shore, which his surgeon directed him to.
The Viper's bite in hot countrys is quickly mortall. The woman they
went to cured them by laying a turky slit at the rump to the places that
they—[?]. 3 or 5, apply'd one after another, cur'd one man, and
so the rest. Any drawer is good, as turpentine, or turpentine and garlick,
[or] Venice Treacle, or flesh of Adder given inwardly."
Near the beginning of the book (pp. 68-69), we find that Allen
has entered a copy of the report, dated 17th February 1657-8,
of an autopsy held on the body of young Robert Rich (only
son of Robert Earl of Warwick), who had died at Whitehall,
the day before, aged 23. The autopsy was conducted, and the
report was signed, by seven physicians and two surgeons—the
former including Allen's father-in-law, Dr. Joshua Draper, of
Braintree, who held (says Allen) the post of physician to both
this and the "last Earl of Warwick"—a post Allen himself
held at the time he wrote. The young man was, it appears, in
extremely bad health.6
Elsewhere (p. 297) we have a most harrowing account of
how a certain Mr. Goodrich (evidently an eminent surgeon,
who was passing through Braintree) performed the operation of
lithotomy, at the White Hart Inn, in Braintree, on a youth
named True, aged about seven years, a son of the landlord of
the inn, on 12 February 1718-9. The operation was per-
formed entirely without anaesthetics, a fact at which Allen (who
witnessed it, the boy being, no doubt, a patient of his) expresses
some surprise. Such an operation was, of course, rarely attemp-
ted at the period, on account of its danger. Curiously, Allen
does not state the result in this case.
Further, we meet (p. 242) with the following note :—
" Sir William Daws, now A[rch]-bishop of York, had a stubborn ague,
ever returning. It tir'd him and fainted him, and he then drank our
steel'd water at Wethersfield, but at last was cured by taking the [Peruvian]
bark every morning for six weeks or two months, as he told me himself,
being advised by several at London and [by] one, a physitian, who had
success in [curing] many that way."
It is likely that Allen had known Dawes more or less inti-
mately and had attended him professionally; for Dawes, beside
having been born at Braintree, had been, for some ten years
(1698-1708), rector and dean of Bocking, where he had been
5 He had married at Whitehall, in the previous November, Frances Cromwell, youngest
daughter of the Lord Protector. Had he lived a few months longer, he would have outlived
both his father and grandfather, and have succeeded to the earldom. He was buried at
Felstead on 5th March (see Miss C Fell Smith's Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick, p. 139, 1901).