How Welsh medicine helped to create America!

A post about one of Wales’ early medical pioneers.

Dr Alun Withey

How is Welsh medicine linked to the establishment of a global superpower? On the face of it the two don’t appear to have much in common! As an historian of Welsh medical history it’s not often that I can make grandiose claims about Welsh practitioners. One of my colleagues once suggested that Galen was actually a mistranscription and that the supposed Graeco-Roman physician was actually G. Allen from Cardiff. Wales, and not ancient Greece, in his view, was the true seat of medical knowledge. With the subject of this post, however, Wales (and Welsh medicine) can lay claim to an important figure in the early history of the United States – Thomas Wynne of Ysceifiog, Flintshire.

Wynne was born in 1627 in Bron Vadog in the parish of Ysceifiog in North Wales, the son of a freeholder. Details of his early life are sometimes obscure. It seems that his father…

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The Case of the Severed Finger: Callow vs Heane, 1634

One from the blog archives for a sunny Monday!

Dr Alun Withey

In my last blog post I looked at a libel case between two Exeter medical practitioners. It was interesting to see how professional reputations were at stake and the ways in which practitioners called each other’s skills into question. For this post I’m staying on a similar theme, but this time a medical practitioner plays the part of a key witness in a bitter dispute between two ‘Gentlemen’ from the Welsh marches in the 1630s.

In September 1634, members of the families of Heane and Callow were enjoying an evening’s revelry in an alehouse in Brockweir, Gloucestershire. No doubt oiled by good sack, a discussion about the wardship of a young member of the Heane family quickly became a debate….and inevitably a dispute which quickly got out of hand.

At some point a £10 wager was made and a member of the Heane family declaimed, loudly, that ‘the Heanes were…

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