- The video you're about to view is a project developed jointly by the York County Schools on the Virginia Peninsula and the Jamestown Yorktown Foundation.

Through this project, we hope not only to help students and teachers gain new insights into science and history in the 18th century, but also to encourage schools and museums to work together to create richer educational opportunities for our children.

Carl Sandberg once said, "Everybody is smarter than anybody.

We hope to prove the wisdom of his words."

- 200 years ago, people looked at the natural world differently than we do today.

Things that we take for granted were just being worked with experimentally then.

In electricity, Franklin was working with storage batteries.

In astronomy, the planet Herschel had recently been discovered, giving us a total of seven planets, not the nine we now have.

And with a microscope, the scientists did not see bacteria, but rather anamanicula, little animals.

Just as science was different 200 years ago, so was medicine.

Many theories existed as to what caused disease.

One of the easiest to explain in a short time is the humoral doctrine.This says the body is made up of four humors or elements.

They are the blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile.

Disease was a signal that one of the humors was out of balance.

It was the duty of the physician to restore the balance to nature.

To show you some of the things a physician might use to restore that balance, let's go back to my tent.

Fever was a symptom of disease that showed the body was out of balance.

Fever was connected to the blood.

If you had too much blood, you would have a fever.

Doctors would lower the fever by removing some blood.

They could do this in many ways.

Attaching a sucking parasite called a leech, making an incision and using a cupping glass to draw a measured amount, or making several small cuts in the skin and using a poringer to draw off the blood would reduce the fever.

An average amount of blood drawn would be 10 ounces, slightly more than a cup.

Doctors felt that you had twice the amount of blood than has been proven we have.

Therefore, drawing off some blood would do no harm.

Bleeding was a common cure for fever, a common symptom.

And while not everyone today uses aspirin for headaches, then not everyone used bleeding for fevers.

It was just the most common form of treatment.

I'm getting ready to make some medicine.

Why don't you go outside and visit with Alma for a little bit?

- There was a lot of work for women to do with the medical department.

They promised you 24 cents a day if you would care for the wounded and sick and full rations.

There was washing to be done.

And you cook for the ones that were sick.

And then sometimes you helped to hold down the patients while the surgeon was operating on them.

Sometimes you just had to bury whatever it was you cut off.

There was much work to be done.

And they wanted to have a nurse for every 10 wounded or sick man.

You like 10 women for 100.

Never did get sufficient.

No, there were not enough nurses.

There was not enough doctors neither.

Doctors are far and few between.

They are.

Well, you know, to get a fine medical degree, you had to travel all the way to Europe, which was exceedingly expensive.

Now here in America, we had two medical colleges before the revolution, but most of the men could only afford to serve as an apprentice, you know, to a practicing doctor.

They had to pay for such as that too.

Most times the young men started when they were about 15 and it was seven years before they was finally certified.

Of course, now they were gifted with a few surgical instruments or fine volumes, things like - That.

- But most care was given by wives and mothers.

You learned the recipes from your mother onto the daughter and you used of it.

Oh yes, there's all manneri of chores to be done.

Not his most useful, you know, scraping the old rags like this.

And you scrape this and it'll give you lint.

And then a surgeon now, he can use it for packing a dressing.

You can even use it for stuffing a wound.

You know, some women, they could write.

And when they made themselves up a recipe book with all their foods that they made, they also put in recipes for taking care of different kinds of problems, what you might have.

I got a book I'd like you to see.

Now this book was written by a woman by the name of Hannah Glass.

And she has in it a fine recipe for treating someone what got bit by a mad dog.

For the bite of a mad dog, for either man nor beast, take six ounces of roux, cleaned, picked and bruised, and four ounces of garlic peeled and bruised.

And then four ounces of venice trickle and four ounces of filed pewter or scraped in.

And you boil this all together with some fine beer.

And then after a bit, you will strain it off.

And you know it was good for treating man or woman or child or even your, your horse or your dog.

Now Mr.

Wiggins, he's in his tent over there and he's making up some medicines.

You might like to join him.

- Medicine in the 18th century came from three major sources.

Animal and animal products, minerals and plant products.

Animals like the oyster shell, horse hoof, and animal products like the two ounces of honey that I'll be using later.

Mineral like asphalt, sulfur, and nitrom or salt peter, of which I have one dram on this scale that I'll be using later.

And plant products like dragon's blood resin, castor oil, and vinegar like this two ounces of apple cider vinegar I'll be using later.

I'm about to prepare a common gargle from a pharma kapia, which is a medical recipe book that was written in 1778.

This uses elements from all three of the worlds, the mineral, plant and animal world.

I'm going to start with six ounces of spring water and add to that one dram of salt peter.

That's a mineral.

Then I'll use two ounces of vinegar from the plant world and one half ounce of honey from the animal.

Then I mix it up.

It's now ready for the patient to use.

This inventory from the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War shows us many important medicines were in short supply.

And while a doctor might be able to make a common gargle, he frequently was without important medicines.

Sometimes he had an important medicine, but he didn't have the weights and other measuring devices to ensure a proper dose.

British imports were a main source of our medicine and once the war started, we didn't receive them.

Sometimes we captured British supplies and the British would at times even poison these so we didn't have medicine in that manner.

Other problems facing the Continental Army surgeon were six men per tent, lack of proper clothing and lack of proper food.

In a day when contagious disease would kill nine of every 10 men who died, it made it difficult for the surgeon to live the Hippocratic oath, which says preserve human life.

Only one of 10 would die of surgical procedures.

Let's head outside and talk about surgery.

The doctor works outside in the fresh air to keep a wound from going bad.

First, let's take a look at what caused a wound.

75 caliber musket ball, which is capable of taking an arm or a leg off at 150 yards can do a great deal of damage to a person's body as well.

But probably the most recognized surgical procedure, the time is amputation, which can occur quite easily when a musket ball hits an arm or leg.

To anesthetize or relieve the pain of the soldier, a stick, a musket ball or a piece of rag or leather would be used in the patient's mouth to keep him from biting his tongue.

A tourniquet is used to constrict the flow of blood to the wound site.

It is slipped around the limb and pulled as high as you can on the arm or leg.

Twisting tightens it down and keeps the blood from flowing.

The first step is to use a catlin, a double edged flesh knife, or what many recognize as a scalpel.

After we've gone through the skin, we need to go through the muscle.

And to go through the muscles of the leg, a leg muscle knife to go through the muscles of the arm and arm muscle knife.

Each is proportionate to the size of the limb.

Next, the muscle separator is used by sliding along the incision until the bone is where the hole is.

The surgeon overlaps, snaps and pulls the muscle out of the way, thus allowing the surgeon to use the bone saw and recess the bone in the end of the stump.

From the first cut through the flesh with the catlen, through the final cut through the bone with a bone saw takes approximately one and a half to two minutes.

Actually less time than a commercial break.

Now we must close.

And in order to close, we tie off the blood vessels using a tinaculum.

It hooks the blood vessel and pulls a waxed linen thread over the end of the blood vessel, tying it in a knot.

If the blood vessel is too large or too fatty due to ossification or what we call hardening of the arteries, we use a hot cauterizing iron to burn the blood vessels.

This would be heated in a fire and then applied to the blood vessel.

Next, we have to prevent putrifaction of a wound, what they called infection.

We can pour turpentine in the wound, pour alum in the wound, or we can even pour salt in the wound.

Next day, prepared lint, which is linen soaked in acid and dried in the sun.

And then we must sew the wound clothes.

Stitches.

Using a curved needle.

Horse hair is used as a thread.

Now, as nasty as these surgical procedures have sounded, 40 to 60%, four to six of every 10 men that were worked on would survive quite well.

That's fairly impressive.

Let's go over some of the things we've talked about.

You've learned that 200 years ago, doctors believed that the body was made up of four elements.

If one of these elements was out of balance, you were sick.

They learned this in medical universities, but primarily through apprenticeships, which could last up to seven years.

Most sicknesses, however, were taken care of in the home.

And whether you're talking home remedies or medicine used by a doctor, there were three sources of medicine.

Plants, minerals, animal and animal products.

Doctors in the American Army of the Revolution faced many hardships.

18th century medicine, however, must be remembered as having scientific observation, accurate measurements, and a strict upholding of the Hippocratic oath.