Page 41 - Demo

The Siege of Charleston in 1780 began a painful period under British occupation for South Carolinian patriots. Siege of Charleston, after a painting by Alonzo Chappel (New York: Johnson Fry & Company, 1860).
Peter Fayssoux began his medical education
at fifteen, during Charleston’s devastating 1760 smallpox epidemic. The pestilence claimed over nine hundred victims that year and caused economic and political upheaval in the colony. With physicians in steady demand, Fayssoux apprenticed with the preeminent Dr. Alexander Garden, who initiated him in the arts of inoculation and the use of medicinal plants.
In the eighteenth-century, Edinburgh was
the heart of the medical world. Fayssoux crossed the Atlantic to matriculate at the prestigious University of Edinburgh in 1766 to read medicine. While in Edinburgh, Fayssoux began
a lifelong friendship with classmate Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia. Rush would become his country’s most notable physician after signing the Declaration of Independence and serving as surgeon general of the Continental Army.
While still in Scotland, however, he and Fayssoux devoted themselves to mastering medicine.
Twenty-five-year-old Dr. Peter Fayssoux
returned to Charleston in September 1769, full of newfangled theories and unchecked confi- dence. He was vexed to find that the medical doctrines espoused in Edinburgh were not always accepted in America, and he sometimes had professional disagreements with Charleston’s elder physicians—even his old mentor Dr. Garden. After a rocky start, his practice began to prosper. By 1772 he had gained enough social and economic capital to marry Sarah Wilson and soon their only child, Frances, was born.
Fayssoux kept in touch with Benjamin Rush
and reported his success. Rush sent Dr. David Ramsay, a promising new graduate of the medical school at the College of Philadelphia, to work
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