John Woodall

John Woodall (1570 to 1643) was an English military surgeon, Paracelsian chemist, businessman, linguist and diplomat. The son of Richard Woodall of Warwick, he was apprenticed at sixteen or seventeen to a London barber surgeon but did not finish, and from 1589 gained experience as a surgeon with Lord Willoughby's regiment in France. He then lived and worked as a surgeon in Poland and at Stade, near Hamburg, where he sometimes interpreted for English ambassadors. Admitted a freeman of the Company of Barbers and Surgeons of London in 1599, he lived mainly in Holland until 1603, then settled in Wood Street in London, where he treated victims of the plague. He made a fortune stocking medical chests for the East India Company and later the armed forces of England. His book The Surgeon's Mate became the standard text advising ships' surgeons on treatment at sea, and its dietary recommendations would have prevented scurvy had they been followed.