Boston’s “Sedan for Removing the Sick”

Lining up the sparse mentions of sedan chairs in colonial Boston reveals a clear pattern: they were used to transport sick people.

In 1674 the Rev. John Oxenbridge of the First Meetinghouse suffered a stroke while preaching the Thursday Lecture and “was carried home in a Cedan.”

Thirteen years later, Judge Samuel Sewall wrote in his diary: “Capt. Gerrish is carried in a Sedan to the Wharf and so takes Boat for Salem, to see if there he may find amendment of his Distemper.”

In May 1715, the newly reappointed governor Joseph Dudley was bed-ridden with gout. At the end of the month, Sewall wrote, he came to Boston and “was carried from Mr. Dudley’s to the Town-House in Cous. [William? Jeremiah?] Dummer’s Sedan: but twas too tall for the Stairs, so was fain to be taken out near the top of them.”

Yesterday I listed five times sedan chairs were advertised for sale in eighteenth-century Boston newspapers. I don’t think it was coincidence that four of those ads were estate sales, and the fifth seller died within two years. Those men might have acquired sedans as they or their wives became too ill to walk around.

Boston also had a public sedan chair, operated by the town itself. In March 1739, the Boston selectmen took note of “A Sedan, or Chair belonging to the Hon. Edward Hutchinson Esqr. which the Town has had the loan of for a considerable time.” One of those local elected officials was Thomas Hutchinson, and the sedan owner was his uncle. The selectmen decided that the chair “be effectually Repaired, and made fit for Use, in the best and frugal manner.”

That sedan chair became part of Boston’s public-health infrastructure. On 4 Jan 1757 the selectmen voted “that the Sedan for Removing the Sick be broke to Peices” and “Mr. [Isaac] Cazneau make a good Serviceable Sedan at the Charge of the Town.” Cazneau was a saddler.

In 1760 the Massachusetts General Court bought land in the sparsely populated western point of the Boston peninsula called “New Boston” for a new hospital. Four years later, the town suffered a serious smallpox epidemic. That appears in the selectmen’s records with an uptick in orders for the sedan chair to carry people to that hospital.

• 16 Jan 1764: “Information was given the Select men by Dr. [Phillip] Cast, that One Hallet who came from Newfoundland a Month past, and Boards at Mrs. Nicholsons in Fitches Alley, has the Symptoms of the Small Pox upon him whereupon the Select men endeavour’d to perswade him to consent to his being removed, and having obtain’d such consent, he was accordingly removed in the Sedan to the Province Hospital at New Boston.”
• 20 Jan 1764: “The Select men having prevailed with Mr. Adams to consent that his Child should be removed from his House to the Hospital at New Boston, they at about 12. OClock that Night took Mr. Williston and a number of hands with the Sedan to said House, when they received the Wet Nurse and Child and carried them to said Hospital”.

Similar entries appeared through August of that year.

TOMORROW: “Mr. Williston.”

(The picture above shows a sedan chair used to carry medical patients in La Paz, Bolivia, now in the Wellcome Collection in London.)