William Lucas, Doctor of the Cholera Camps
No physician within a hundred miles — so the William & Mary man nursed the cholera camps of Sacramento, and set the coast's bones ever after.
When cholera scoured the Sacramento diggings around 1849–1850, the mining camps had almost nothing that could be called medicine — except, it turned out, an educated miner named William Lucas Plaskett.
A student of William & Mary College in Virginia, and no physician at all, William Lucas acted as doctor and nurse to the stricken. Many died — the epidemic was merciless — but he stayed among the sick and helped those he could, armed with little more than his education and his nerve.
The habit never left him. Years later in Pacific Valley, a hundred miles from professional care, it was William Lucas who set the broken bones and doctored the neighbors — the coast’s physician by default, from the cholera camps to the end of his days.