Mathias Abebe

Class of 2025, Johns Hopkins University

 

Glass plate negative of portrait of John Woodall, by George Glover, 1639, engraving, glass plate dimensions 12 x 16.5 cm, Wellcome Collection, London. Source: Wellcome Collection.

John Woodall (1570-1643) was a military surgeon, chemist, diplomat, businessman, and linguist. During his teenage years, he was apprenticed to a London barber-surgeon, but did not finish his apprenticeship. However, he gained surgical experience from 1589 to 1590 supporting Henry IV of France and King of Navarre in the campaign against the Catholic League of Normandy. Afterwards, he spent eight years in Germany and Polonia (Poland) as surgeon to English merchants while also sometimes interpreting German into English for English ambassadors. He also worked in Holland from 1599 to 1603, when he went back to London and treated those suffering from the plague.

 

The Tetragrammaton and orders of heaven surmounting portraits of famous medical philosophers, by George Glover, 1639, engraving, 24.2 x 15.8 cm, Wellcome Collection, London. Source: Wellcome Collection. See portrait of Woodall bottom center.

In 1612, Woodall was made the first Surgeon General to the East India Company after helping the governor, Sir Thomas Smith. He was elected as a surgeon at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in 1616. He was imprisoned in 1625, however, after he served a writ on Sir Thomas Merry, a servant of the King, for owing him money. He stayed with the East India Company until 1635, when he was dismissed for financial reasons, but kept a monopoly on supplying the company’s medical chests (in which he was appointed to supervise in 1626) until his death. He was most known for writing The Surgeons Mate, or, Military and Domestique Surgery, a medical textbook that is known as the first set of guidelines of its kind written in English. It was written for young sea surgeons, with information on the types and uses of instruments and medicines, acute surgical problems, lethal medical conditions and scurvy, as well as alchemy and chemical medicines.

Further Reading:

 

Appleby, John H,  “New light on John Woodall, surgeon and adventurer” Medical history, 25:3 (1981), 251-68. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0025727300034578

Hazelwood, Glen, “John Woodall: The First Surgeon-General” in The Proceedings of the 12th Annual History of Medicine Days, 21-23 March 2003 (Calgary AB: The University of Calgary, 2003), 117-125

Stein LeJacq, Seth, “Roy Porter Student Prize Essay: The Bounds of Domestic Healing: Medical Recipes, Storytelling and Surgery in Early Modern England”, Social History of Medicine, 26:3 (2013), 451–468, https://doi-org.libproxy.ucl.ac.uk/10.1093/shm/hkt006

Tyrkkö, Jukka, “‘Weak Shrube or Underwood’: The unlikely medical glossator John Woodall and his glossary” in Historical Dictionaries in their Paratextual Context, edited by Roderick McConchie and Jukka Tyrkkö (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2018), 261-284. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110574975-011