Medical Man

When my great-great-grandfather, Charles Powell, finally yielded to a long and tiresome illness on March 13th 1869, he had already been under the medical care of his nephew, Dr Josiah Taylor Powell, for several years. Dr Powell (1832-1892) was an active and popular medical practitioner who lived at a time when significant scientific and social advances were changing the whole face of the medical profession. Josiah Taylor Powell has no living descendants that I have been able to trace, and, regrettably, no portrait or photograph, nor any of his correspondence or other papers, is known to have survived. Nevertheless, he deserves to have his story told, and, to do this, I have enlisted the help of some of his colleagues and medical contemporaries.