Who was Thomas Hammond?
Apothecary jar from the Hoffbrand collection © Royal College of Physicians
Thomas Hammond was destined to practise medicine. His grandfather and father were both apothecaries. Thomas, his two brothers, two of his sons and his nephew all trained as apothecary surgeons.
He was born in 1766 and probably apprenticed to his father in Edmonton, near London, for five years. He studied at Guy’s hospital from 1785-87 where he would have been a contemporary of Astley Cooper, a surgeon’s apprentice who was to become the most famous surgeon in the land and attend to King George 4th. Thomas was dresser to William Lucas Senior, one of the Guy’s surgeons, in 1786. A dresser admitted patients, accompanied the surgeon on ward rounds and as the title says dressed the wounds of patients. These would have often been smelly and festering.
Thomas passed the exam of the Corporation of Surgeons in 1787. In January 1790 he married Susannah Bampton, the wealthy widow of a confectioner. His father died in May 1790 and he took over his practice in Edmonton at a large house called Wilston, 7 Church Street. Keats’s maternal grandmother Alice Jennings moved to 3 Church Street in 1805. Wilston was demolished in 1931 but is marked by a plaque above an estate agents on Keats Parade in what is now Edmonton Green, London.
Hammond was trained as a surgeon and an apothecary. Hence the title apothecary surgeon. He would also have learnt obstetrics in his time at Guy’s. He would have examined and diagnosed patients, compounded drugs and administered medicine. Irvine Loudon writes in 1783 80% of medical men in provincial England were apothecary surgeons. In Middlesex, where the Hammonds practised, in 1783 there were 68 apothecary-surgeons and 3 physicians.
These apothecary surgeons, with their skills in examination, diagnosis, compounding and prescribing medicines, midwifery and surgery, evolved into general practitioners. The earliest example of the term “general practitioner” was in 1809. So Thomas Hammond was one of the first GPs in England.
Sources
Burnby, Juanita. The Hammonds of Edmonton. Edmonton Hundred Historical Society, 1973.
Loudon, Irvine. Medical Care and the General Practitioner, 1750-1850. Oxford University press, 1987.