DR. BENJAMIN ALLIiN, OF BRAINTREE. 
5 
before he could return him on shore, which his surgeon directed him to. 
The Viper’s bite in hot countrys is quickly mortall. The woman they 
went to cured them by laying a turky slit at the rump to the places that 
they-[?]. 3 or 5, apply’d one after another, cur’d one man, and 
so the rest. Any drawer is good, as turpentine, or turpentine and garlick, 
[or] Venice Treacle, or flesh of Adder given inwardly.” 
Near the beginning of the book (pp. 68-69), we find that Allen 
has entered a copy of the report, dated 17th February 1657-8, 
of an autopsy held on the body of young Robert Rich (only 
son of Robert Earl of Warwick), who had died at Whitehall, 
the day before, aged 23. The autopsy was conducted, and the 
report was signed, by seven physicians and two surgeons—the 
former including Allen’s father-in-law, Dr. Joshua Draper, of 
Braintree, who held (says Allen) the post of physician to both 
this and the “ last Earl of Warwick ”—a post Allen himself 
held at the time he wrote. The young man was, it appears, in 
extremely bad health. 6 
Elsewhere (p. 297) we have .a most harrowing account of 
how a certain Mr. Goodrich (evidently an eminent surgeon, 
who was passing through Braintree) performed the operation of 
lithotomy, at the White Hart Inn, in Braintree, on a youth 
named True, aged about seven years, a son of the landlord of 
the inn, on 12 February 1718-9. The operation was per¬ 
formed entirely without anaesthetics, a fact at which Allen (who 
witnessed it, the boy being, no doubt, a patient of his) expresses 
some surprise. Such an operation was, of course, rarely attemp¬ 
ted at the period, on account of its danger. Curiously, Allen 
does not state the result in this case. 
Further, we meet (p. 242) with the following note :— 
■" Sir William Daws, now A[rch]-bishop of York, had a stubborn ague, 
ever returning. It tir’d him and fainted him, and he then drank our 
steel’d water at Wethersfield, but at last was cured by taking the [Peruvian] 
bark every morning for six weeks or two months, as he told me himself, 
being advised by several at London and [by] one, a physitian, who had 
success in [curing] many that way.” 
It is likely that Allen had known Dawes more or less inti¬ 
mately and had attended him professionally ; for Dawes, beside 
having been born at Braintree, had been, for some ten years 
(1698-1708), rector and dean of Booking, where he had been 
5 He had married at Whitehall, in the previous November, Frances Cromwell, youngest 
daughter of the Lord Protector. Had he lived a few months longer, he would have outlived 
both his father and grandfather, and have succeeded to the earldom. He was buried at 
Felstead on 5th March (see Miss C. Fell Smith’s Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick, p. 139,1901). 
