By: Adam Ockers, serving with the Beverly Heritage Center
One of the Beverly Heritage Center’s most intriguing artifacts is an account book from the mid 19th century. It is an unassuming thing, the covers have been lost long ago and the pages darkened from their original white to a soft brown. In addition to the change in their color, the pages stiffened over time and some of the edges are prone to flaking. It sometimes feels like the book will fall apart in your hands as you flip through it. The only thing about this book that might spark interest at a glance is the inscription on the front page, that reads; “Dr. Squire Bosworth Beverly WV”. If, for whatever reason, someone were to take interest in this rather homely volume and open it up they would find a genuine treasure trove of Beverly history.
Dr. Squire Bosworth served as one of the few doctors in Randolph county during the 19th century. He was born in Massachusetts and was educated there at Williams College before moving to Virginia. Eventually he arrived in Beverly, married, and took up an informal apprenticeship under Beverly’s then doctor, Dr. Dolbeare. In addition to his training with Dr. Dolbeare, Bosworth attended medical lectures in Richmond. Dr. Bosworth kept this account book from the years 1847 to 1851 and it reveals much about what life was like in Beverly during the 19th century.
It’s important to keep in mind that although Bosworth may have been a well credentialed doctor for his time and place, this is still the 19th century, and Randolph county was still quite rural. His treatments for the ailments of Randolph county were not always at the forefront of modern medicine. Probably the most common treatment in Dr. Bosworth’s arsenal was bloodletting. A tragic byproduct of Aristotelian anatomy, bloodletting was the practice of removing “excess” blood from a patient in order to restore their internal balance. This practice persisted from ancient times well into the late 19th century despite now being known to provide no medical benefit to the patient. Many doctors thought of bloodletting as a catchall treatment, and Bosworth used it liberally. So liberally in fact that some historians (me) speculate that he may have been a vampire. Bosworth most often gave this treatment to women, but men and even children could find themselves on the receiving end of a scarificator. Bloodletting was slowly on its way out by the time Bosworth practiced medicine, but there were many doctors, often in higher positions than Bosworth, who argued for its utility. So it remained in medicine for years after Bosworth retired. The reader may be happy to learn that many patients in Beverly received this treatment more than once, showing that at least it didn’t kill them.
Another common appointment for Dr. Bosworth was to have him pull teeth. Many prominent Beverly residents had multiple teeth pulled in the four year period that this book records. Ignoring for a moment just how miserable this procedure must have been in the age before novocaine, the sheer volume of teeth that needed extracting is staggering. By 1850 Beverly residents over the age of 30 must have given up chewing food altogether, and instead drank nutritious broths and watered down soups for sustenance. Almost equally staggering is what Bosworth charged for this procedure. To get a tooth pulled in Beverly in 1850, you would pay a meager $0.25. That is $8.91 in 2022 dollars (this calculation is from officialdata.org, they sounded official). Try finding a medical professional today that will do anything for $8.91.
In addition to normal visits where Bosworth would take a tooth and maybe some blood, then be on his way, the book records a few cases that were more out of the ordinary. One of these cases was in July of 1850, when Dr. Bosworth was called upon to extract a pea from a child’s nose. This can’t have been enjoyable for either party and Bosworth charged double his going rate for a regular visit. On October 30th in the year 1847, Bosworth visited a house for the purpose of, in his words, “extracting bullet from child”. How the bullet got there and why is lost to history. While these are some of the strangest cases, there were other entries that can help us imagine what life was like. Bosworth treated a woman who fell off a horse, healed burns, prescribed medicine, and gave much needed medical instructions to the people of Beverly. Randolph county was lucky to have him, and the Beverly Heritage Center is lucky to have his account book.
