The Mysterious Dr. Kilpatrick

In 1717, a man calling himself James Kilpatrick (sometimes spelled Killpatrick) arrived in Charleston, South Carolina. His exact date of birth is unknown but was sometime in the 1690s. He joined his uncle, David Kilpatrick, who already lived in the colony. 

James Kilpatrick claimed to be a native of Ireland. He set himself up as a doctor, a profession in demand in the feverish colony. He had studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh but had not completed the MD.  

His lack of a medical degree was not a significant problem in the young colony, which lacked any kind of licensing system. The medical "profession" in Charleston at the time included people with little formal medical training, or none at all.   

Kilpatrick achieved some financial success. St. Philip's Parish vestry appointed him visiting physician to the parish poor. He established a pharmacy in the early 1730s -- something that modern doctors cannot do. 

In 1727 he wed Elizabeth Hepworth, an heiress and the daughter of the secretary of the colony. They were married at St. Philip's Church. A few years later he received a joint grant of more than 200 acres, and presumably engaged in a bit of rice planting. 

During Charleston's smallpox epidemic in 1738 Kilpatrick was one of the first doctors to employ the practise of inoculation. One of his children had died of the disease, and he decided to inoculate the rest of his family. He then inoculated several hundred residents. 

He vigorously defended his use of the procedure in the town's newspaper and in pamphlets. His efforts aroused controversy but enhanced his reputation in the long term. 

Upon the outbreak of war with Spain later that year -- the wonderfully named War of Jenkins' Ear -- he enlisted as ship's surgeon. He accompanied General James Oglethorpe's failed expedition in 1740 against St. Augustine, the Spanish stronghold in Florida. [Image: James Oglethorpe]

Around 1742, Kilpatrick moved to London with his wife and children. He established himself in medical practise and completed an MD from Edinburgh. Mysteriously, he also changed his name from Kilpatrick to Kirkpatrick.  

Why did he change his name? An old argument is that he decided that a name that began with "Kill" was not a good one for a doctor. That may be, but there is a more compelling reason: Kirkpatrick was his real name. 

That raises another question: Why did he change it to Kilpatrick on coming to South Carolina? The answer lies in British politics in the early 18th century. The Kirkpatricks were a Scots family who backed the wrong side in the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715.

The aim of the rebellion, and a couple more that followed, was to place the Catholic Stuart claimant "James III" (The Old Pretender) on the British throne, in place of the Hanoverian George I, who had just arrived from Germany.

The rebellion failed. People who had supported it, or were even suspect, were denounced as rebels. Many fled or tried to change their identity. James Kirkpatrick seems to have done both. 

He claimed to have been born in Ireland. Perhaps he was. But his family was Scottish, and he may have been born in Scotland. He attended Edinburgh University shortly before the 1715 Jacobite Rebellion. 

Did he take part in it? Possibly, or perhaps he was assumed to have done so because others in his family did. In any case, the political danger may have made a change of name seem like a good idea. The same goes for his migration to South Carolina. In a frontier colony, it was easier bury one's past and start afresh. The colony's promoters welcomed white men to a place where enslaved Africans already made up a majority of the population.  

When Kilpatrick changed his name back to Kirkpatrick, nearly 30 years had passed since the rebellion in which he may have been involved. Another, and more serious Jacobite rebellion took place in 1745, but no one could argue that he had taken any part in that. In any case, the Jacobite threat ended with the defeat of the army of "Bonnie Prince Charlie" at Culloden in April 1746. It was the last battle fought on British soil. [Image: Culloden]

 

Moreover, while in South Carolina, he had demonstrated his loyalty to the British government by serving as a naval surgeon in the Oglethorpe Expedition to St. Augustine. 

After arriving in London, he published an account of the 1738 smallpox epidemic in Charleston, highlighting the success of inoculation in the epidemic and his own role within it. 

When a smallpox epidemic broke out in London in 1746, Kirkpatrick helped found the innovative Smallpox and Inoculation Hospital, believed to be the first in Europe to specialize in that area. It provided free treatment to the working class. [Image: Smallpox and Inoculation Hospital,  Coldbath Fields, London]

Kirkpatrick collaborated on the hospital project with Isaac Maddox, Bishop of Worcester. Maddox later helped him to publish The Analysis of Inoculation (1754), a treatise on its history, theories, and practise. The book was translated into several languages and gained him a reputation as an expert on the subject. 

In the Analysis, he claimed to have revived inoculation in Britain after it had fallen into disuse. This was exaggeration, but he did help to popularize it, especially in France and the Continent. He inoculated members of the French and British aristocracies. 

Kilpatrick/Kirkpatrick harbored poetic as well as medical ambitions. He used them to celebrate the maritime and naval achievements of the British Empire, in a long poem entitled The Sea-Piece. He had composed it, he said, in South Carolina between 1717 and 1738. He published it in London in 1750. 

He praised the works of Alexander Pope, whom he called the poetic lord of the British empire. He wrote several poems commending and defending Pope and an elegy on Pope after his death in 1744. 

Kirkpatrick died in London in 1770. His son James became a high-ranking officer in the British East India Company. He was known as the "Handsome Colonel." Two of the colonel's sons, William and James Achilles Kirkpatrick, also attained high rank in the Company. 

James married an Indian princess in Hyderabad. The marriage ended in tragedy; a story superbly told by William Dalrymple in White Mughals.  

Further Reading: 

James Kilpatrick, An Essay on the Small-Pox Being Brought Into South Carolina in the Year 1738. (London, 1743)

James Kirkpatrick, The Analysis of Inoculation. (London, 1754). 

Peter McCandless, Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry. (New York and Cambridge: 2011, 2014)

William Dalrymple, White Mughals. (London, 2002)

David S. Shields, Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, and Commerce in British America, 1690-1750. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,1990)