James Yonge (surgeon) facts for kids
James Yonge (27 February 1646/1647 – 25 July 1721) was a Royal Navy surgeon from Plymouth, England, where his father was a surgeon. He went to sea as an apprentice surgeon as a young boy. Later he joined several voyages with Newfoundland fishing fleets. In his twenties he set up a practice in Plymouth and prospered. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1702 and Mayor of Plymouth for 1694–1695. He wrote medical textbooks and a journal of his life.
Background
Little is known of the forebears of James Yonge. His father's origins as a surgeon in the Plymouth area are unclear. He may have come from Ireland as a member of the Protestant ascendancy there. Yonge refers in his Journal to visiting his grandmother in Cork. The accounts in Burke's Landed Gentry that he descended from the Yonges of Colyton, Devon, are unfounded.
Yonge's mother, Joanna Blackaller (1618–1700), was the daughter of Nicholas Blackaller, a merchant of Dartmouth, Devon. His parents were married in St Saviour's, Dartmouth, in September 1640. By the time Yonge was born, his parents had moved to Plymouth, where he was baptised in the Parish Church of St Andrew on 11 March 1647. He was the fifth of seven children, all of whom survived at least to early adulthood.
There is a family story of a quarrel with his brother Nathaniel, who unlike Yonge was not a Royalist. There is evidence that they did not get on in Yonge's Journal.
Life at sea
In 1658 Yonge's father had him articled as an apprentice at the age of ten to Silvester Richmond of Liverpool, a surgeon on the Navy vessel HMS Constant Warwick. He was next appointed surgeon's mate to HMS Montague, part of Lord Sandwich's fleet in the Downs, with which he sailed in 1660, aged 13, for an ineffectual bombardment of Algiers in the following year. He was released from his apprenticeship in May 1662, by his master's retirement, then worked as an assistant at Wapping to an apothecary named Clarke, where he presumably gained practical knowledge of making up medicines.
Yonge returned to Plymouth in September 1662 and was unwillingly bound to his father for another seven years. This action by his father rankled him all his life: "My elder brother was maintained like a prince, I clad with old turned cloaths, and not one penny in my pocket, he was hard as a master."
At sea again, Yonge took voyages to the Newfoundland fisheries, the first in May 1663, aged 16, in the ship Reformation. Yonge spent his time on land walking between settlements, sketching and observing the industry. In January 1666, during the Second Dutch War, his ship the Bonaventure was captured by the Dutch and he was shackled with other prisoners for 51 days. The biography of the Victorian writer Charlotte Mary Yonge by Christabel Coleridge dubs Yonge a galley slave of the Moors, possibly conflating his time as a Dutch prisoner with his naval service off Algiers. In September 1666 he was exchanged for a relative of the secretary of the Dutch Admiralty, who was imprisoned at Harwich.
Yonge made what was to be his final voyage in February 1668, to Newfoundland in the Marigold of Plymouth. He describes his arrival: "Coming up with the ice we find no passage, stand through it and in two hours got on the inside of it... but not without knocking our ship. find ourselves the first ship in the land and Admiral of St Johns. God be praised for this good landfall and good place!"
Medicine
Yonge returned to Plymouth on 29 September 1670 and established himself in practice, aged 25. He was then appointed surgeon at the Naval Hospital in Plymouth, set up after the outbreak of the Third Anglo-Dutch War in 1672. In 1674, Thomas Pearse, Surgeon-General of the Navy, made Yonge his deputy.
In 1692, after his appointment as surgeon to the new dock at Hamoaze, Plymouth, Yonge had to go to London. While there he attended Edward Tyson's anatomical lectures at Surgeons Hall. In London again in 1702, he was persuaded to sit the examination of the College of Physicians, as an Extra-Licentiate. He states in his journal that there was no need, as he did not intend to practise in or around London, as he already had licence from the Bishop (presumably the Bishop of Exeter), but the College persuaded him it would add to his status. Yonge corresponded with Sir Hans Sloane and associated in London with Francis Atterbury, Charles Bernard, Edward Browne and Walter Charleton as well as Tyson. He was also a frequent visitor to Oxford, where he catalogued the Ashmolean Museum and was entertained at the University.
Yonge exposed the plagiarism of John Browne, whose Compleat Treatise of the Muscles appeared in a second edition in 1683. Yonge pointed out that it put together text from the Muskotomia of William Molins with illustrations from the Tabula anatomicae of Giulio Casserius.
Civic affairs
By the 1670s Yonge had become of importance, called to fill successive civic and professional offices in Plymouth, whose charter had been restored by Charles II. In 1679 he was elected a life member of the Common Council of the Borough of Plymouth. In 1682 he was appointed a churchwarden at St Andrew's. In 1694 he became an alderman and mayor of Plymouth.
Yonge's brother Nathaniel was also involved in the politics of the town.
In his Plymouth Memoirs Yonge gives short biographies of mayors in his time, containing "ye memorable occurrences in their respective yeares".
Yonge held the appointment as surgeon to the Devonport dockyard from 1692 to April 1701. Towards the end of his tenure at the end of the 17th century, a residential terrace was built at the dockyard for senior officers. Most of this was destroyed in the Second World War, but Yonge's part survives.
Yonge's service for the Navy ended on an unhappy note in 1701.
Financial rewards
In his Journal Yonge refers to 12 shillings as the fee for a twenty-mile visit, another £1, and, for an outside visit of two days' duration, £1 l0s. Bleeding a lady in bed cost 10 shillings, as against 2 shillings and sixpence for a man. A post mortem 3 shillings and fourpence.
During the late 17th century, Yonge seems to have travelled over Devon and Cornwall. He gave his earnings for one year, receiving £40 for 12 days treatment for a man run through with a blade, a lady at Butshead that he often had to visit £40 a year, tapping Mr Pake 25 guineas [£26.25] etc., curing 9 fistulas for which he got between £30 and £70 each, treating an ulcer in the bladder for four years £200 etc. .....
One of the last commissions he refers to in his journal is embalming a body in preparation for the lying in state in London of Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell, who drowned off the Scilly Isles in one of the worst peacetime disasters of the Royal Navy. For this he was paid £50.
Once his name was made, Yonge's role resembled that of a consultant or society doctor. He amassed a large fortune through hard work and one suspects hard commercial thinking. A document in the Plymouth and West Devon Record Office shows his assets and income in 1718 at £21,000 – remarkable from a medical practice. It is hard to compare monetary value with today, but as an example from several sources, an average farm labourer in 1718 earned £18 a year and an attorney £120. Yonge's wealth placed the family in society for generations to come.
Death
Yonge died on 25 July 1721 and was buried in the Church of St Andrew, Plymouth. A memorial was erected, but apparently destroyed in the Second World War, when the church was badly damaged.
Family
Yonge married on 28 March 1671 Jane, daughter of Thomas Crampporne of Buckland Monachorum in Devon. By her he had two sons, the elder predeceasing him, and six daughters, of whom only one, Johanna, survived to adulthood to have a family of her own.
Yonge's eldest son James Yonge (1679–1718) married Mary Upton, daughter and heir of John Upton of Puslinch, Newton Ferrers, Devon. Yonge made this possible by paying off Upton's debts and mortgages and building a new Puslinch House for some £10,000. The house remains in Yonge family ownership.
