More on Francis Labee 1697-1755

Francis Labee, the senior surgeon/barber-surgeon under whom Beddome trained for the medical profession appears to have been born around 1697 and died in 1755. He was probably a Huguenot ship’s-captain’s son. Beginning as a Baptist he became a Methodist. He appears to have taken on two apprentices after 1726 and apprenticed more over a 30 year period (1726-1754). His wife's name was Sarah Labee. Their son Francis junior was also a barber-surgeon. He was apprenticed to his father in 1741 and in 1746 became a surgeon’s mate on a privateer. He himself also taught students later on.

Besides Beddome and his son, Labee's other apprentices include

• The surgeon John Eaton
• The barber surgeon John Evans who began in 1735 and was discharged in 1737.
• The senior surgeon Abraham Ludlow, a Bristolian, in an informal arrangement from 1724. The payment was £20. He himself became a master. He died in 1753. His wife's name was Martha.
• The surgeon/surgeon-manmidwife Morgan Nicholas who was a Carmarthenshire gentleman. He began his apprenticeship in 1754. The payment was £50. His wife's name was Mary Gifford. He moved on to Bath.

Beddome's apprenticeship involved the payment of £26 5s.

Labee was also responsible for the training of Martha Powell as a midwife about 1752. She practised in the countryside until 1762 when she returned to Bristol.

This information can be found here.

Francis Labee and the Wesleys

We have mentioned previously that Francis Labee appears to have been the barber surgeon to whom Beddome was apprenticed. As suggested, Labee drifted from his Baptist roots and became a Methodist. He often gave hospitality to John and Charles Wesley when they were in Bristol. (John refers to him as Labbe and Charles as Labee or Labu). Whitefield was also a visitor. In May 1739 John Wesley christened Labee's daughter Sara.

Francis Labee d 1755

The suggestion that Francis Labee was raised a Baptist and that one of his apprentices was the Baptist minister and hymnwriter Benjamin Beddome can be found in William Dyer's Diary Bristol in 1762 here. Apparently Labee and his wife, who remarried following his death, were also close to the Wesleys from 1739 onwards. Dyer (d 1805), an apothecary himself, had bought Mrs Labbee’s old clock at auction for 4 guineas in 1758, and noted that ‘it continues good’ in 1801. The diary is edited by Professor Jonathan Barry.

Labee was a surgeon and man midwife, who was freed in 1726 and was described at his death in his house in Castle Street in 1755 as ‘an eminent surgeon of the city for 30 or more years’.

A letter of 1750 notes that Mr Labee had lent the (Bristol Methodist) society £50 but demanded its return: he was a surgeon in Bristol who had given hospitality to Howell Harris in 1746.

Surgeon Apothecary

We have noted that following his schooling in Bristol, Beddome was apprenticed to a surgeon apothecary and seems to have taken well to it.* He apparently never lost his love for things medical. Two of his sons trained in the same field and he himself, it seems, carried on some form of medical practice in Bourton. It is said that he would often turn to the world of medicine for an apt illustration in his preaching. (Remarks in Memoir, xi, which reveals that Bernard Foskett, like many a nonconformist minister at that time, also had a medical training).

It is perhaps worth noting, therefore, that the term apothecary, often used between the 1600s and 1800s, does not refer to a chemist or druggist but was used for individuals living in London who had passed the examinations of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries of London, founded in 1617 (a break away from the grocers company), or to their often less well qualified counterparts in the provinces. Although the apothecary's practice included a strong dispensing element, it was more all-encompassing than the handling of drugs and chemicals. Following a ruling in the Rose Case (1701-1703/4), apothecaries became legally ratified members of the medical profession, able to prescribe as well as dispense medicines.

In the 1700s apothecaries were some of the most common medical practitioners. In Bristol in 1775 there were 8 physicians, 56 surgeon-apothecaries and 3 druggists. Medical students could become a surgeon-apothecary without going to university (nonconformists were barred from Oxford and Cambridge until 1828 so it was an obvious route into medicine for them), and could earn a living from minor surgery and dispensing drugs. Until 1754, surgeons were allied with barbers in the barber-surgeons company. Under the Apothecaries Act of 1815, apothecaries who took a specified course of training with the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries could be licensed as general practitioners, and were called licentiates.

*We later discovered that this man's name was Francis Labee. Beddome's apprenticeship perhaps lasted from about 1730-1737.