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John Tennent arrived in Virginia from England about 1725 and settled in Spotsylvania County. What, if any, medical training he had is unknown. Nevertheless, by 1734 he had produced his first physiological treatise, Every Man his own Doctor: or, The Poor Planter's Physician. Printed by William Parks at Williamsburg, it enjoyed such popularity that it was reprinted twice in Philadelphia by Benjamin Franklin. It was his next treatise, An Essay on Pleurisy, published in 1736, that announced Tennent's life-long crusade, the therapeutic use of Virginia's native rattlesnake-root for a wide variety of ailments. Introduced to him by the Seneca Indians, the herb was declared by Tennent to be particularly efficacious in the treatment of pleurisy and peripneumonia (pneumonia). "'My success was so great," he claimed, "that I did not lose above four or five Patients in an Hundred, tho' other Practitioners lost two Thirds." The next year he returned to London where he made himself known to some of the city's leading lights of medicine. One of the most brilliant of these was Dr. Richard Mead, physician to the king and an intimate of such other notables as Isaac Newton, Alexander Pope, and Robert Walpole. Returning to Virginia in a typically choleric humor, Tennent was further disgruntled by the controversy his unorthodox cures had generated in the Virginia Gazette. Always willing to stir the pot, in 1738 he published an open letter to Dr. Mead (present here in the 1742 edition), in which he elaborated upon his extraordinary theories of disease and elevated rattlesnake root almost to a general panacea. Citing the "ingratitude of the colony," Tennent returned to England in 1739 where he spent the remainder of his life vainly striving for the recognition he felt was owed him.
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