Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [12]
For whatever reason, Jeronimus Cornelisz followed the latter path and began to train as an apothecary. In the early modern age, the medieval system of craft guilds remained strong throughout the United Provinces. Would-be blacksmiths and grocers, surgeons and tailors—all were required to find themselves a master and bind themselves to him for a period of between three and seven years. The master gave the student board and lodging and revealed to him the mysteries of his trade. In return, the student provided labor for the duration of his apprenticeship.
At the conclusion of the contracted period, the boy—by now a young man—was required to prepare one or more masterpieces, samples of work that, quite literally, demonstrated mastery of his chosen profession. These masterpieces were submitted for examination by officials of the relevant guild, and, if the apprentice was judged to have acquired a thorough knowledge of his trade, he was permitted to join the guild himself. This was a significant commitment. Membership of a guild brought with it certain obligations, and in particular the requirement to contribute regularly and liberally to guild funds. Many men who had successfully completed their apprenticeships never could afford to pay these fees and remained journeymen all their lives.
Jeronimus was probably apprenticed at some time between 1615 and 1620. His was a coveted position. In early modern Europe, qualified apothecaries had a monopoly on the preparation and supply of medicines and were therefore more or less assured a steady stream of customers. Their nostrums were complicated and expensive, and many grew rich supplying them. Gideon DeLaune, a French emigrant who had his dispensary at the English court, died leaving $144,000 and was more wealthy than the majority of the nobles whom he treated. Dutch apothecaries, while not quite so spectacularly rich, were generally well-off.
The number of illnesses requiring their attentions was endless. The major infectious diseases, endemic throughout the century, were plague—which proved fatal in somewhere between 60 percent and 80 percent of cases—leprosy, and typhus. Dysentery (which killed one in four of its victims), syphilis, tuberculosis, and typhoid were also commonplace. Those fortunate enough to escape the attentions of these killers often succumbed to virulent influenza—called “the sweats”—smallpox, or malaria. Cancer was relatively scarce; few people lived long enough to develop it.
It is possible, even now, to determine with some precision just how common and how widespread these complaints were in the disease-ridden seventeenth century. There were, for example, no fewer than 123 saints in the Catholic heaven to whom those struck down by fever could pray for intercession, by far the largest number devoted to any particular affliction. A further 85 saints were kept busy with supplications from parents desperate for help with the wide variety of childhood diseases. Fifty-three more saints covered the panoply of plagues, and there were 23 whose sole concern was gout. Catholics even had a patron saint of hemorrhoids: St. Fiacre, an Irish priest who had lived a life of notorious mortification in the seventh century.
As an apprentice apothecary, the young Cornelisz would have spent at least three years learning to prepare the myriad potions, unguents, poultices, and clysters that were the stock-in-trade of the seventeenth-century pharmacist. The identity of his master is not certain, but there is at least a possibility that he was Gerrit Evertsz, an apothecary and corn-trader who ran a prosperous business in Leeuwarden from the early years of the century until his death some time after 1645. Evertsz was clearly someone with whom Cornelisz