How Barton Hill played a crucial role in the history of vaccinations

A new book tells the life story of an 18th century Quaker physician, Dr Abraham Ludlow, who gave jabs in an obscure smallpox hospital at Barton Hill.

Its very existence has been almost forgotten by the rest of Bristol, but the site is still easily identifiable if you talk to locals in the know.

In 1767, Dr Ludlow and a Bristol Infirmary colleague John Ford were recruited by John Rodbard, a surgeon from Suffolk, to run the Barton Hill “inoculating house” with him.

This was 30 years before their contemporary in Berkeley, Dr Edward Jenner, developed his ground-breaking vaccine to curb the lethal disease.

Smallpox was the 18th century pandemic. It spread unchecked across Europe and the rest of the world, killing or badly scarring large numbers of people across all social classes.

Before Jenner, all attempts to find an effective way of inoculating people failed. However, in the 1760s Rodbard became one of many partners in a nationwide business offering new and safer jabs, known as the Suttonian Method.

This had been the brainchild of Robert Sutton and his son Daniel, both also from Suffolk.

Daniel Sutton acquired Royal Table House at Barton Hill as their smallpox hospital for Bristol. Patients were lodged here in a comfortable and sanitary environment for about a fortnight after their jab.

The origin of its name, Royal Table, seems to be unknown. The house was a spacious three-storey mansion, with extensive gardens, built in about 1709 as the retirement home of a sea captain, James Smith.

The building stood in what was then sparsely populated countryside, just outside the city. A nearby pub, now gone, was named the Royal Table after it.

The house was renamed as Barton Hill House in the early 19th century and later partly rebuilt.

It narrowly survived wartime bombing in 1941 and is still there today on Barton Hill Road, now serving as the vicarage for St Luke’s Church.

Bristol’s smallpox hospital was originally built in the early 18th-century as the retirement home of a sea captain and was located in countryside just outside the city – photo: Martin Booth

This important bit of history is barely known outside Barton Hill. I found most of the information in a small book called Leaves from a Barton Hill Notebook.

It was written in 1954 by a local historian, William Sanigar, as a guide to the development of Barton Hill over 250 years.

A current resident, Garry Atterton from the Barton Hill History Group, drew my attention to it after the recent publication of my own book Pills, Shocks & Jabs. My book traces the careers of Dr Ludlow and other medics in Georgian Bristol who were also religious Nonconformists.

Dr Abraham Ludlow (1737-1807) was a flamboyant and controversial figure in Bristolian medical circles.

He earned a fortune from his private practice based in St Paul’s and made enemies among senior colleagues at the Bristol Infirmary with his arrogant appearance and behaviour.

Dr Abraham Ludlow taken from ‘A History of the Bristol Royal Infirmary’ by G. Munro Smith, published in 1917

The Barton Hill inoculating house, or smallpox hospital, is also referred to in the Diary of Sarah Fox nee Champion, published 200 years after she wrote it.

Sarah came from a wealthy Quaker family of industrialists. Her brother, Richard Champion, manufactured Bristol China in the porcelain works next to their home at Castle Green in what is now Castle Park. Abraham Ludlow was their family doctor and personal friend.

Castle Green as seen in JF Nicholls and John Taylor’s ‘Bristol Past and Present’ (Arrowsmith, 1882)

In a diary entry for March 1768, Sarah describes taking her young niece and nephew to get their jabs at the Barton Hill premises: “A very commodious house fitted for the reception of any patients, & under good regulations.”

The children, accompanied by a servant, stayed there for about two weeks. Sarah’s diary then records: “The children being pretty well, whom we had seen most afternoons at the inoculating house, I went to Stoke [Bishop] for the summer.”

In Leaves from a Barton Hill Notebook, William Sanigar accuses Dr Ludlow and company of charging extortionate fees for a jab only the rich could afford.

He writes that, among the locals, Royal Table House became “so notorious that Barton Hill, a quiet almost unknown place before, was made the talk of the town”.

Sanigar adds: “We are not told what the charges were, but it was claimed that so scandalous were they that none but persons of fortune could resort to Barton Hill.”

However, Abraham Ludlow also played a key role in improving healthcare for the cash-strapped mass of the city’s population.

In 1775 he was put in charge of treatment at the original Bristol Dispensary on Stokes Croft. This was an early public health clinic, where Dr Ludlow massively increased the availability of a professional midwifery service for poor but respectable women.

The most dramatic step of all came in 1801, when Dr Ludlow was nearing retirement but still active. The Bristol Dispensary introduced the city’s first vaccinations – a term invented by Jenner – for children of poor families.

Here they gave the new jab two days a week, every Tuesday and Friday. This was only three years after Jenner had self-published the results of his successful experiment with injecting cowpox pocks, to give immunity against the far more serious form of the disease.

This traffic island in Stokes Croft was where the original Bristol Dispensary was located from 1775, with Dr Ludlow in charge of treatment – photo: Martin Booth

Abraham Ludlow was 12 years older than Edward Jenner (1749-1823) and must have known him.

The country doctor in Berkeley began his career as an apprentice for seven years to Abraham’s cousin Daniel Ludlow (born in 1720), a surgeon in Chipping Sodbury.

This coincided with some of the period in the 1760s when Abraham was giving jabs at Barton Hill.

In his own youth, Daniel Ludlow had been apprenticed to Abraham’s namesake father, also a surgeon, in central Bristol.

It’s likely that both cousins helped with training the young Jenner and collaborated with him afterwards. I’m still trying to discover how closely.

Peter Cullimore is the author of Pills, Shocks & Jabs – the Remarkable Dissenting Doctors of Georgian Bristol

Main photo: Martin Booth

Read more:

• The hidden river flowing underneath Bristol city centre
• The secrets rooted in a tree as old as Domesday
• The ornate features hidden in plain sight across Bristol

Listen to the latest Bristol24/7 Behind the Headlines podcast: