Fort Brooke, located in the southern end of today’s downtown Tampa, was the first large-scale American settlement in the area. The military fort, established in 1824, was the catalyst that helped create the Tampa we know today. However, during those early years and well into the 1870s, there wasn’t much in the town – and later city – of Tampa other than a few dozen homes, some scattered businesses and a handful of professionals, i.e., doctors, lawyers, etc.
In fact, the first medical professionals in the area came here courtesy of the U.S. Army and were either military doctors or civilian doctors brought by the military, particularly during the Second Seminole War (1835-1842).
In the military jargon of the time, army doctors were given the titles of surgeon and assistant surgeon, and while they did have medical training, the overall education of doctors at this time was nothing like it is today. Still, the efforts of the medical staff were critical, especially during wartime and during an era when diseases were as deadly as the battles themselves.
One of the first surgeons at Fort Brooke was Dr. Thomas Lawson. Described by one biographer as “more soldier than doctor,” Lawson nonetheless served as the senior surgeon in the army and, in 1836, became the Surgeon General. He also operated the “general hospital” at Fort Brooke during the early stages of the Second Seminole War. That hospital was the only one of its kind in peninsular Florida, south of Fort King (present-day Ocala), at the time (though there was a hospital at Key West).
There was at least one doctor who preceded Lawson at Fort Brooke. Assistant surgeon John Slade Gatlin joined the army in 1834 and, the following year, was assigned to Fort Brooke.
Doctors who served in the army were often assisted by civilian doctors attached to state volunteer units. One such doctor was Hosea Lewis Cushman. Cushman learned the medical profession in Maine and traveled to Florida by way of Louisiana, where he was attached to a group of volunteers who were organized to fight the Seminoles in Florida. Cushman wrote one of the few journals from this time that still exist, and though brief (it only covers 1836) is full of information. He writes about treating wounds from warfare as well as illness from malaria and yellow fever. He also mentions several other doctors, some military and some civilian.
Cushman arrived a month too late to treat Ransom Clark, one of Fort Brooke’s most famous casualties. Clark was the only true survivor of the ill-fated command under Major Dade. Those troops were attacked on December 28, 1835, on the Fort King Road near today’s Dade City (named in the major’s honor), and at the end of the day only four of the 107 soldiers survived. One of the survivors was killed the next day on the road back to Fort Brooke, while two of the three others died at the fort of their wounds. Only Clark, who was shot five times (in the pelvis, shoulder and abdomen) lived to tell their story. Among the dead was Dr. Gatlin, who was ordered to accompany Dade and his men to Fort King.
By the early 1850s, civilian doctors began setting up practice in the town of Tampa. The military still operated a hospital at Fort Brooke until the end of the decade. Military doctors returned to the fort in the 1870s, and one of them began to probe around the old American Indian mound that sat near the shore on the southeastern edge of the fort. To his mild surprise, he unearthed several ancient human bones from the mound. He dutifully documented his find and sent it to the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. It is believed that those remains have been repatriated, but that detail needs to be confirmed.
The end of the fort in 1882 and the arrival of the railroad one year later brought about the beginning of modern Tampa, and with it the flourishing of modern medical practices. The Hillsborough County Medical Association was founded by the city’s doctors in 1895.
Rodney Kite-Powell is a Tampa-born author, the official historian of Hillsborough County and the director of the Touchton Map Library at the Tampa Bay History Center, where he has worked since 1995.
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