*

Currie, a strong contrast to the gentle, kind and graceful physician last mentioned, but he had an extensive practice and accumulated a large fortune, which the other did not, because, like many other physicians, he was more attentive to his practice. than to his fees, and earned many which were not worth attention.

Dr. Cringan, who resided in the wooden dwelling on Eighth street, in the rear of the United Presbyterian Church, was much esteemed, and in professional deportment held a middle station between the two I have mentioned. His student, Dr. John Adams, became his partner in medical practice.

I remember no other cotemporaries of the oldest physicians I have introduced. Doctors Lyons, Greenhow, Watson, Nelson, Clarke, Trent and Bohannan, succeeded them, and Doctors Chamberlayne, Cullen and Warner, bright names in the faculty, were of still later date, though their cotemporaries for many years. I may have omitted many names of more or less celebrity in years long past, as well as more recent; but if I were to attempt an enumeration of those of later date, I might, if memory served, enlist as many as I allot to the city at the opening of this chapter.

* His house was taken down in 1859 to be supplanted by a Methodist church.

I will therefore discharge the physicians and turn to their subalterns, the apothecaries, though in old times each doctor was his own pharmaceutist, keeping medicines in his office, which his students-if he had any-would prepare according to his prescriptions-if they understood them.

There could not be employment for many apothecaries when physicians made up a large portion of their own prescriptions; but they obtained their medicines from these druggists. About the year 1800, there were but three-if I am correct— occupying the two corners and the centre of the square on Main between Thirteenth and Fourteenth streets. The shop of the brothers Ternan (Irishmen) was at the lower corner, in a part of the same wooden house already twice mentioned as yet standing there. A visit to their shop might have rendered an emetic superfluous, so begrimed with dirt was it and its attendants; but they made a fortune. Crawford's, at the upper corner where the cannon stands erect, was quite a contrast in point of neatness; but he was less popular, though also from the Emerald Isle, and did not reap so rich a harvest. Duval, the sire and grandsire of apothecaries, occupied the central shop, and was among the first to prepare nostrums in the shape of anti-bilious pills, in opposition to Dr. Church. He also established a pottery and a manufactory of tiles for roofing, but with all his enterprise and

industry, I doubt if his dirty rivals did not make the most money.

The Medical College is of modern date, having been established in 1837, by the united influences and exertions of Doctors Chamberlayne, Cullen, Warner, Maupin and Bohannan. The Union Hotel was converted into a medical school and hospital. Limbs, instead of cutting capers, were cut in pieces in the ball room-potions were mixed instead of punch-poultices supplanted puddings, and Seidlitz water, champagne. Now, the former order of things is reinstated at the Hotel, and young doctors are diplomatized and patients are physicked in the Egyptian edifice on the old Academy or Theatre Square-so frequently mentioned in these pages.

The Medical College erected there has acquired stability and celebrity under a succession of competent Professors. In 1860, about 200 medical students seceded in a body from the Northern Colleges, in consequence of the John Brown raid at Harper's Ferry, and the excitement created by his admirers, the abolitionists. Thereupon the Virginia Legislature granted $30,000 for the extension of the College and Hospital.

CHAPTER XXI.

NEWSPAPERS AND PRINTERS.

THE oldest newspaper in Richmond in my young days was "The Virginia Gazette," Federal in politics, published semi-weekly by Augustine Davis, editor and printer. In the former capacity the implement he chiefly used was the scissors, and he resorted to the pen on indispensable occasions only, as in his hands it was a dull one compared with the other. The Gazette was little. more than half the size of the present "Dispatch," but did not contain half as much in matter, and was not more than one-fourth of the broad sheet of the "Richmond Whig" or "Enquirer."

Mr. Davis was Postmaster in those days when the northern mail arrived thrice a week, and was five or six days coming from New York, and he performed in person the duties of the office. The news from Europe was seldom less than five or six weeks old, and occasionally ten. Under such circumstances, the accumulation of news when it came had to be compressed in small space. Correspondence," foreign or domestic, was not even imagined, and I suspect that term might

justly be applied to much that appears now-a-days, and has so imposing an aspect, especially under the foreign head, emanating from the garret of "a penny-a-liner," and hashed up from a mass of European papers, or prompted by some stockjobbers or brokers.

Mr. Davis's Gazette was Federal in politics, and being for many years without any professional editor, rendered no service to the party it professed to espouse. Its Republican opponents sometimes cunningly used it as a tool for their own purposes. Mr. Jones of the "Examiner," and some of his co-laborers, would occasionally send Mr. Davis anonymous articles in reply to their own in the "Examiner," the drift of which would escape Mr. D.'s acumen, and he would publish them, whilst the authors would laugh at the success of their trick, and reply to and expose the weakness of the article they had palmed on their adversary.

The old saying that "a lie in a newspaper is good for two paragraphs," assertion and contradiction, did not hold good usually in Mr. Davis's time. There could generally be enough of "authentic intelligence" collected in three days to fill his short columns, without having recourse to any thing but plain matters of fact, as was the case with newspapers generally; rendering manufactured news a dull and unprofitable commodity; so that there were few workmen in that line, and no report