Edward “Neddy” Stevens had one goal in life, and that was
to be a doctor of physic. His father, Thomas Stevens was a prominent merchant
in Christiansted, and they lived in a beautiful house on King Street. When he
wasn’t studying his school books he was assisting the cows and horses from the
neighboring plantations in their labors. He had no fear of blood or mucus, and
the ordeal of giving birth caused him no queasiness. He also studied the
smaller creatures on the island: the lizards, the crickets, the beetles, and
the occasional scorpion or tarantula. The latter almost causing his expulsion
from school when he placed it in Master Fraser’s desk. Neddy had an almost
innate understanding of how their tiny bodies were perfectly adapted to their
environment. The marvelous compound eyes of bees, the delicate, gauze-like
wings of dragon flies, and the slender proboscis of butterflies designed to sip
the sweet nectar of the flowers like a sailor who drinks his grog from a
slender bottle. It was all perfect by Nature's design. And it brought him no
end of delight. By far his greatest possession was a book on medicine
called A New Practice of Physic, which his father had purchased from the
estate of an elderly doctor who passed away from too much spirits. That book
was like the Holy Grail to Neddy, and he was always diagnosing his classmates
as having dropsy or scurvy or myopia, with the occasional case of chicken pox
or the ague. His mind was never at rest and in this regard we were perfect
companions.
(From The Lost Diary of Alexander Hamilton, due out in 2020.)
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