More than a quarter of century before the start of the American Revolution, Philadelphia physician Thomas Bond, M.D., proposed building “a small, provincial hospital for sick, injured, and lunatic patients” in his hometown, according to the History of Pennsylvania Hospital website. 

Like many physicians at the time, Bond studied medicine in Europe and was impressed by the “hospital movement” in England which cared for the sick “in hopes of removing the ailing from charity rolls,” according to the website. Doctors treating patients would learn and advance the practice of medicine.

When Bond returned to America in 1750, he proposed the hospital idea to the city’s movers and shakers. According to the website, he was asked, “Have you consulted Franklin on this business,” and “What does he think of it?”

So Bond asked his friend Franklin about the idea. The city’s leading citizen not only liked it, but he organized a petition (which he never signed) and presented it to the Pennsylvania Assembly on Jan. 20, 1751. Politics being politics, there was pushback, the website notes. Rural assembly members worried that the hospital would only serve city dwellers.

Franklin challenged the assembly. If he raised 2,000 pounds from private citizens (America’s first Go Fund Me campaign?), the assembly would then kick in an additional 2,000 pounds. 

Franklin raised the money and the assembly forked over 2,000 pounds. After more political wrangling, the bill was signed into law on May 11, 1751, and Pennsylvania Hospital became the country’s first hospital. 

New hospital, same old medicine

Medicine in 1776 was, to quote the hospital’s website, “primitive.” The concept of germs causing disease and illnesses was still almost a century away. In colonial times, doctors practiced “heroic” medicine. The real heroes were the patients who had to endure bloodletting, purging, blistering and sweating to shock the body back to health.

There was one notable exception. With smallpox spreading across the nascent country,  George Washington, who contracted the disease on a trip to Barbados in 1751,  mandated that every soldier in the Continental Army be inoculated against it. 

“Variolation” (what vaccination was called in those days) had been practiced in ancient China, according to History of Vaccines website. It was first practiced in America in 1721 by doctors in Boston, according to the Medicine in Colonial North America website. But it was still very controversial. 

Worried about losing the war, Washington made Philadelphia an inoculation center. Approximately 40,000 soldiers got vaccinated. If Washington had not ordered the inoculations, America may still be part of the British Commonwealth. 

In the late 1700s, medical remedies were still based mostly on European herbals that quoted “liberally from translations of Greek writers.” Colonists, however, did learn from Native Americans how to use the different parts of the plants, herbs, trees and shrubs as medicine.

According to “Native American Medicinal Plants: An Ethnobotanical Dictionary,” 2,700 plants, herbs and trees were used for medical purposes by 218 native tribes. The American Institute of the History of Pharmacy lists several remedies. For instance, the bark of the wild cherry tree was brewed into a tea or infusion to treat colds, fever, and labor pains. 

Black coshosh tea

Tea made from the root of the black cohosh plant was used for a sore throat, cough suppression, to relieve a headache, and address gynecological issues, according to the website. Native Americans chewed the root of the echinacea plant to relieve toothaches or a sore throat. Today, a pill form of echinacea is used to boost the immune system to fight off a cold or the flu. A poultice made from yarrow leaves was used to clot blood from open cuts and wounds, while goldenseal was used for skin and digestive issues, according to the website. 

The Lenni Lenape (original people in Algonquian, an indigenous language) lived along the rivers and waterways snaking through the Philadelphia region centuries before the first colonists arrived. The tribe developed “a pharmacopoeia based on plants and other natural substances like clay and mud,” according to the West Philadelphia Collaborative History, a project sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. 

The Lenape grew flora to treat abscesses, headaches, cuts, bruises, menstrual cramps and even arthritis. “Lenape Indian Medicines,” published in the Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of New Jersey (No. 40, 1986) contains a list of herb and plant remedies compiled by Glenn McCartlin whose grandmother, Minnie Fouts (1871-1949), was “a highly respected member of the Lenape tribe.”  

By 1776, however, most of the Lenape had left the area, forced from their land by colonists. Along with their plant-based pharmacopoeia, the Lenape also left two trails that would become Northwest Philadelphia’s main roads.

“Part of Germantown Avenue and Bethlehem Pike are parts of the Lenape trail system,” said Alexander B. Bartlett, curator and archivist of the Chestnut Hill Conservancy. “It was called the Minsi Trail.”

At the time of the Revolution, Northwest Philadelphia was little more than a waystation between Allentown and downtown Philadelphia. Chestnut Hill, Bartlett says, was a simple crossroads village. There were inns, taverns and stores spaced out along what is now Germantown Avenue. Farms stretched out beyond the town, while the waters of Wissahickon and Cresheim creeks powered the grain, grist, and sawmills on their banks.  

As for an apothecary? 

“Not until much later,” Bartlett said, adding that he has never been able to pinpoint the date of Northwest Philadelphia’s first pharmacy. That could be because remedies were “at your disposal. Everything was natural.”

Waiting for a garden to grow

The cornerstone for the Pine Building, and what would become Pennsylvania Hospital, was laid in 1755, according to the hospital’s website. The first patient was admitted in 1756. Inside the Pine Building, located at Eighth and Pine streets, is the nation’s first surgical amphitheater to teach students, the nation’s oldest medical library, and a nursing museum. It is scheduled to open on May 8 as the Pennsylvania Hospital Museum.

Franklin wrote the cornerstone inscription, gushing about “George the second happily reigning; (For he sought the Happiness of his People),” before concluding, “And of many private Persons, Was piously founded, For the Relief of the Sick and Miserable. May the God of Mercies Bless the Undertaking!”

In 1774, physicians met with the hospital’s board to propose an onsite botanical garden. The garden, they said, would provide physicians with the natural ingredients  necessary for their medicinal elixirs. 

Everyone agreed and, 200 years later, the first plants were sown as part of the nation’s Bicentennial celebration. What was the holdup? A “variety of reasons, chiefly financial” according to the website.  

“The garden was built in 1976 but [the plants] were taken from Ben Franklin’s journal,” said Dan Bangert, the hospital’s grounds team leader. “He got information from the local native tribes on using plants along with settlers who had been here a couple of hundred years.”

Every herb, plant, tree and shrub in the Physics Garden represents plants grown for medicinal purposes in 18th century America. Bangert notes. Some are the exact same species and genus and some like Digitalis purpurea (foxglove), used to treat congestive heart failure, play an important role in modern medicine. 

But tracking down varieties with the same medicinal properties found in Franklin’s journal can be tricky. Gardeners have phased out some, he said, adding, “I’m trying to be authentic to what Ben had.” 

“For me, it is important for remembering where we came from and where we are going,” Bangert said. “It is important to say this is how we, as a people, solved stuff just 300 years ago. It shows us where we came from and how we improved upon it.”