Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

parishioner’s treatment by a ‘mountybank’. 389
In the next period this zone was served by
medics in Feckenham, Beoley and Studley. A newspaper advertisement sheds light on
the modus operandi of one Feckenham doctor ‘that serv’d his time in London’. 390
John
Eades, chirurgeon of Studley was of local yeoman stock as was Richard Poynter, barber
of Beoley. Poynter had £185 worth of debts due to him, while his working tools were
worth a mere £1-3-4. 391
Female nurses or midwives rarely surface in the documentation,
but one midwife was presented by churchwardens, not because of any occupational
deficiency, but as a reputed papist. 392
In the 1740s Studley secured the services of
Widow Serjeant as governess of their new workhouse and William Dewes, baker, as
workhouse-master. 393
Studley was probably the only parish in this zone with a
workhouse at this time, but the poor were a constant problem for officials in every parish.
At the start of Period C Feckenham’s barber, Samuel Pew, perhaps administered
to medical needs, but medical care was becoming somewhat more specialised by the end
of the period, when half the parishes had surgeons. However, overseers’ accounts reveal
various women paid as (unqualified) healers or nurses. 394
Some local women also acted
as midwives, although Dr. Taylor of Redditch was delivering babies in the 1790s. 395
Local records in the 1790s also mention two druggists. 396
389 WoRO, Feckenham burials May1683 and WoRO, BA2724, which reports surgeons without licences. E.
Barnard, Some Beoley Parish Accounts 1656-1700, p. 21. A mountybank is a quack doctor.
390 Worcester Postman 19 to 26 June 1719. He had perfect cures for gout, running gout and rheumatism
and could be ‘spoke with at the White Swan’ in Alcester every market day.
391 WoRO, probate of Richard Poynter, Beoley, barber, 1710, £216-12-0.
392 WoRO, BA2289/2, Beoley churchwardens’ presentments, 1706, regarding Ann Cork, midwife.
393 WaRO, DR536/32, Studley workhouse accounts, 1740.
394 WoRO, BA4284, Feckenham overseers of the poor accounts. Berrow’s Worcester Journal 2 July 1778
reports about an unfortunate case where a ‘noted’ Feckenham ‘doctress’ gave her patient mercury in error,
causing his death.
395 http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/webbsredditch Chapter 2 (10.30 a.m. 21 Aug. 2008).
396 WoRO, probate of Richard Cox , Feckenham, 1791, mentions William Hanson, druggist, and WoRO,
marrage licence of Joseph Johnson, Tardebigge, druggist, Nov. 1799. The descriptor ‘druggist’ was
apparently replacing the earlier term ‘apothecary’.
328