I recently spent an afternoon with members of our Biology Department cleaning up a stream known as College Branch that runs immediately beside our campus. In the course of the afternoon, one of the professors said he had been given a book written by John Wesley describing medical remedies for a variety of maladies. He asked me if John Wesley had medical training as well as theological training.

I assured him he did not have any formal medical training as far as I was aware. At Oxford, however, he had attended medical lectures, preparing himself in case there were no physicians in the Georgia colony. He secured the advice of a pharmacist and an experienced physician, and he referred the more serious cases to medical specialists. Wesley himself actually administered medicine and treated simple illnesses.

John Wesley probably knew as much about medicine as any non-medically trained person in 18th century England. He actually prescribed treatment for many poor people who could not afford to see a doctor. And for an extended period he organized apothecaries in London and Bristol dispensing free medications to the poor.

In his WORKS, it is recorded that while in Dublin he inquired about a person suffering from pleurisy. The editors say, “It is not clear whether Wesley advised this person to apply a brimstone plaster, but they had done so and received relief from their pain and fever.”

Wesley was upset with physicians who treated such patients with bleeding: “O why will physicians play with the lives of their patients! Do not others … know that no end is answered by bleeding in a pleurisy which may not be much better answered without it?”

Medical training? Not really; certainly not in a formal sense. But it is clear John Wesley was so intent on serving those who needed help they probably could not afford, that he went to great lengths to become as informed as possible about basic medicine and safe practices.


Craven E. Williams
President
Greensboro College
Greensboro, N.C.