Sutures for a Surgeon's Journal

A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts is a book originally published in 1816 anonymously, but well known at the time to have come from Benjamin Waterhouse, the first doctor to vaccinate for Small Pox in the United States.  But that’s a different story. 

The book was a best seller when originally published. And it turns out that Waterhouse didn’t write the book, but instead edited it.  The actual author was another American surgeon named, Amos Babcock who served on a ship during the War of 1812, and was taken prisoner by the British.  Subsequently, he spent time as a prisoner of war in a number of localities, the most notorious and last being Dartmoor Prison, in Britain. 

Dartmoor – at the time the name alone sent chills down a grown man’s spine. If he were British it was because the place was on the moor and was considered a place of evil.  Babcock adequately describes this:

This moor affords nothing for subsistence or pleasure. Rabbits cannot
live on it. Birds fly from it, and it is inhabited, according to the
belief of the most vulgar, by ghosts and daemons ; to which will now
doubtless be added, the troubled ghosts of the murdered American
prisoners. . . It is a fact that the market people have not sufficient
courage to pass this moor in the night. They are always sure to leave
Princetown by day light, not having the resolution of passing this
dreary, barren and heaven-abandoned spot in the dark. Before the bloody
massacre of our countrymen, this unhallowed spot was believed, by
common superstition, to belong to the Devil.

If he were French or English, it was because of its reputation for being a prison  with cramped and deplorable conditions.  

Most Americans today probably don’t know that around 1,500 Americans died at Dartmoor during the War of 1812 while prisoners of war. -- mostly from malnutrition and disease.

Babcock arrived at the Dartmoor prison October 1814, and he was there the day of an event called the Dartmoor Massacre of April 6, 1815. Seven Americans died and 31 were injured that day.  The war was essentially over when this happened.  The Treaty of Ghent had been signed.  Ships were on the way to bring the Americans home.  He includes official documents about the event and also tells what he witnessed of it, before, during and after.

I recently acquired a first edition copy of this fascinating book.  Because the Dartmoor Massacre is probably most famous event the writer describes, a foldout diagram showing the layout of Dartmoor Prison is the book’s  frontispiece,  It is referred to a number of times in the text.  I can imagine readers perusing the book and then going to the front to look at the diagram, folding it out, and then folding it back out – and then going back to the text.  That, I imagine, is why a large section of the frontispiece is missing from my copy, and I suspect quite a few other antique copies of this work, when you can find if and when you can find one.

My copy, however,  does still have the central panel of the Dartmoor Prison frontispiece.  Even that has been ripped in half, but painstakingly sewed back to together with tiny stitches.  It must have been sewn back together many years ago, probably sometime later in the 19^th century.

Why would someone go to such trouble?  One can only guess. The events were much closer to those 19^th century readers than to us.  We barely know or would care that the British ever held Americans prisoners of war on their native soil.    But Americans reading the book in 1820 probably read the book eagerly to know what the world was like – as seen by one man’s eyes, a Young Man from Massachusetts.

A picture of the frontispiece shown Dartmoor Prison as can be found at history.navy.mil

The frontispiece sutured up.