Jabez Allen was born in East Dorset, VT, in 1808. At the time of his death 77 years later, he was the oldest living member of the Medical Society of Erie County. Possessed of an insatiable curiosity, he was rightfully proud of his education, despite the 1830s Jacksonian populism that ridiculed many professions and most attempts at higher education.

In the early 19th century, herbalists, homeopaths, snake-oil salesmen and graduate physicians alike competed for patient attentions, and with four of America’s ten medical colleges, New England was oversupplied with graduate doctors. Jabez had apprenticed with his older brother James, who had already established a practice in East Dorset. But after their mother died of typhoid, he decided that opportunity lay in the American West. In the spring of 1834, he headed out along roads that were little more than dirt paths cleared of stumps. The shortcut to Ohio took Jabez along the Holland Land Company’s Middle Road (today’s Route 20A), where he helped free several family oxcarts mired in the mud along the way.

Henry Perry Smith’s History of Buffalo and Erie County claims that Dr. Allen saw a patient just hours after arriving in the village that is today known as East Aurora. In 1834, the Globe Hotel would have been the first three-story building encountered, enticing travelers with the promise of a bath, a warm meal, a soft bed and a quality horse stable. Village doctors often left word at the saloon when they were out of town on a call, and so a patient seeking an absent doctor may have prompted Dr. Allen to offer his services until the resident doctor’s return. Whatever the details, the village made an impression on 26-year-old Jabez and he would spend the rest of his life there.

At the time, New York State law delegated medical licensing to county medical societies, stipulating that all graduates of New York medical colleges would be licensed automatically upon request. Out-of-state graduates, however, were to be given an oral exam by a society-appointed board of censors prior to licensing. Of the six doctors who applied for a license in 1834, Jabez was the only one requiring examination. But the Erie County Medical Society, which met semiannually in June and January, faced a surplus of doctors in the Erie Canal boom town of Buffalo. They reasoned that they could rid themselves of some of the competitors if they simply delayed scheduling exams. Thus, four years would pass and a lawsuit would be threatened before Jabez was examined and licensed in 1838.

The tabling of his application was a stinging blow. Though in East Aurora only a few weeks, Jabez had already invested virtually all of his limited resources to rent and furnish an office at the corner of Church and Main. Plus, he was love-struck. Millicent Johnson, a 22-year-old socialite, abolitionist and his bookish equal, had captured the young doctor’s heart. 

Jabez exchanged letters with Dr. Gorham F. Pratt, secretary of the Erie County Medical Society, and discovered that an Albany County Medical Society investigation had found licensing in New York to be a muddled mess.

In the meantime, however, there were no licensing laws governing apothecaries, pharmacists or chemists. So, with his options narrowed by the exam delay, yet wanting to settle in the village of his love interest, Dr. Allen restructured his business. He turned his waiting room into a pharmacy and painted the words, “No Cure, No Pay” beneath his name on the front window. Thus was established Erie County’s first pharmacy outside the Buffalo city limits, but perhaps not the first to conceal a medical practice.

Property deeds confirm that Jabez and Millicent were married by December 1834 and rented the home at 738 Main Street before purchasing it over a decade later. In 1842, the wood-frame building next to their home on the corner of today’s Pine and Main streets became available. Originally Aurora’s first school, then Joseph Howard’s hardware store, it became Dr. Allen’s new and expanded pharmacy and office. He rented the building for the remainder of his career.

In the early years, Dr. Allen practiced as he was taught in medical college. He bled most patients, some to a near faint, following Benjamin Rush’s heroic theory of medical intervention. Rush believed bleeding relieved capillary pressure that caused fever and the redness of inflammation. He routinely took Hippocrates’ concepts to extremes by purging the bowels with powerful cathartics like calomel (mercury and rhubarb) to remove the byproducts of disease.

By the second quarter of the 19th century, however, lower printing costs made magazines and medical journals more readily available. A voracious reader, Dr. Allen followed emerging studies from medical professionals at large hospitals, like those of Pierre Louis in Paris, whose randomized clinical trial proved that, compared to repeated bloodletting, more pneumonia patients survived if simply given proper food and clean water.

In 1837, Dr. Allen joined other Aurora doctors in warning the community about three cases of smallpox with an ad placed in the Aurora Standard. In November 1843, he was asked to assist during an epidemic of fever, rash, swollen liver and muttering delirium that killed 10 residents of nearby North Boston. Immediately recognizing the epidemic as the typhoid that had killed his mother, he sent for Dr. Austin Flint, the newly appointed Public Health Officer in Buffalo. Case mapping and interviews with survivors linked all episodes to a traveler from Massachusetts and traced every subsequent case to contact with the emissions from an infected person. Flint then published three papers, concluding that typhoid was a consequence of morbid miasmas (vapors) arising from the discharges of infected patients. It was landmark epidemiology, later cited by John Snow in his 1855 treatise on cholera, which was spread by contaminated water from a London well. Snow concluded that cholera was spread by a chemical miasma.

The 1840s were a remarkable decade, medically speaking. Anesthesia made more surgeries possible, antisepsis made surgery safer and, fragment by fragment, the concept of germs emerged. When the University of Buffalo Medical College was organized in 1846, Dr. Allen purchased a $40 subscription as a charter sponsor. Dr. Samuel Hunt, a founding faculty member, recruited Dr. Allen to participate in a national study of miasma that had community physicians collecting daily temperature, humidity and diagnoses seen. Hunt’s data found little correlation between miasma vapors and disease.

Three cholera pandemics, characterized by profound diarrhea and dehydration, did much to defeat the miasma theory of disease. Cholera swept across America in 1832, killing thousands. Canals, regularly scheduled stagecoach service and the emerging railroads allowed cholera’s return in 1849 to spread even faster. Protocols at the two newly opened Buffalo hospitals and the almshouse, however, were little changed from 1832, calling for purging the intestines with calomel every two hours. Thirty percent of patients died before doctors at Philadelphia Medical College realized that patients on their wards who refused calomel were more likely to survive. It would be 1884, just two years prior to Dr. Allen’s death, before the bacteria that caused cholera, Vibrio cholerae, was isolated.

Jabez faced personal loss as the 1849 pandemic hung on for five years. His older brother James had relocated from Vermont to Hamburg in 1836. In 1852, he volunteered to care for three intemperate ne’er-do-wells dying of cholera and within a week James, his wife Rebecca and their son Charles were also dead.

Then, in 1854, 22-year-old Mary Abigail Fillmore, former president Millard Fillmore’s daughter, took the stagecoach from Buffalo to East Aurora to help her grandfather Nathaniel Fillmore and his second wife Eunice settle into their new home next door to Dr. Allen and Millicent. The Allen pharmacy was the East Aurora stagecoach terminal and Abbie purchased peppermints to “settle an upset stomach.” That evening, she awoke with diarrhea and vomiting. It was after midnight when Nathanial sought Dr. Allen’s urgent attendance. Retching, rice water diarrhea and painful muscle cramps left little doubt that Abbie was in the serious grip of cholera. A messenger was dispatched to Buffalo to summon President Fillmore, who arrived just before Abbie died at 11 a.m. the next morning. Dr. Allen sent no bill, but Eunice gifted Millicent a cameo brooch and President Fillmore presented the Allens with the silver teapot now on display in East Aurora’s Fillmore House.

Having served as president of the Medical Society of Erie County in 1873, Jabez looked forward to the 1878 American Medical Association’s (A.M.A.) general assembly being held in Buffalo. Attendees from around the world included doctors Austin Flint from New York’s Bellevue Hospital, Henry Bowditch of Boston, B.A. Watson of New Jersey, A.L. Loomis of New York City and several of Dr. Allen’s former apprentices. 

Arguments over the causes of disease were passionate, suggesting that germs might be shouted in or out of existence. The anti-contagionist faction contended that tiny bacteria could not possibly exist as multiple species, and a recent Royal Society study showing that soil bacteria did not always make injected animals sick proved they were innocuous. Chemists argued that such studies proved contagions must be chemicals, and that the antiseptic activity of Joseph Lister’s carbolic acid would easily denature chemicals as effectively as it might kill bacteria. Germ believers said that German physician Robert Koch’s 1876 studies proved that Bacillus anthracis (the bacteria responsible for Anthrax) existed in two forms, one that is readily destroyed and the other a hardy spore that can drift like dust. Austin Flint admitted he was conflicted. Koch may have proven microscopic organisms cause anthrax, but the role of bacteria in other diseases was unclear.

The average American knew that diseases like measles, diphtheria and whooping cough were contagious and enforced strict quarantine laws to prevent their spread. Sophisticated synopses, written in collaboration with scientists like Louis Pasteur and John Tyndall, were appearing in Popular Science Monthly and Scientific American, along with literary magazines like Harper's Magazine and Millicent’s favorite, the Atlantic Monthly. Still the doctors argued.

The always loquacious Austin Flint admitted his imagination was fired up by the novelty of the findings presented in Buffalo but advised serious reflection before discarding the familiar. In his textbook, Flint argued that much new information, derived from the numeric analysis of records collected from large hospitals, was turning doctors into mathematicians, and unique individual characteristics were being ignored. Doctors, he wrote, do not treat patients as one homogenous mass. Rather, each individual is examined for their peculiar circumstances to which doctors tailor remedies. Flint warned that disease could not be as individually unique as patients.

Village doctors like Dr. Allen attended A.M.A. and society meetings in the hope of seeing over the scientific horizon. Regardless of their pride, they understood how caring for many patients in large hospitals might reveal patterns unrealized in a single patient. Their challenge, however, was remedies. Patients believed in bloodletting and purging, and all this new science had yet to offer new remedies.

As it happened, however, the 1878 A.M.A. meeting was a turning point. While an exaggerated importance placed on regular bowel movements remains to this day, bleeding disappeared as a medical remedy by 1920. By 1890, the New York City Health Department offered bacterial examination and culture of clinical specimens. By 1896, they marketed diphtheria anti-toxin and in the 1930s, the elusive virus was finally seen by electron microscopy.

Jabez and Millicent Allen had four sons. Their first son, James Obadiah, was born in 1836, and after a prolonged illness thought to be tubercular consumption, died in 1848 at age 12. Deloran Johnson Allen was born in 1847. Following the Civil War, he settled down as a farmer in the town of Six Miles, KS. Orange Fargo Allen was born in 1849, married Emma Hanna Griffin and became a prominent East Aurora farmer. For most of his life, Orange went by his middle name, Fargo.

The fourth son, Jabez Allen Jr., was born in 1854. Though prone to melancholy, he began helping in the pharmacy at an early age. By the time he graduated from the Aurora Academy, he was a skilled compounder of drugs. When New York reinstituted licensing laws in 1874, the 20-year-old Jabez Jr. enrolled in Buffalo Medical College, dying suddenly at age 22. Some have suggested suicide, though an injury while performing an autopsy on a patient who died of anthrax was the more likely cause of death.

The Allens were very active in village life and were regular attendees at lectures and debates. A devout Presbyterian, Millicent facilitated the travel of runaway slaves, was active in the Aurora Women’s Society, a chapter of Elizabeth Blackwell’s US Sanitary Commission and a supporter of the arts. Together, the couple invested $1,000 in the 1867 construction of the Buffalo and Washington Railway (later the Buffalo, New York and Philadelphia Railway) line to the area, and Dr. Allen is listed as an officer. He was also a signatory to the 1874 merger of Willink and Upper Village, creating today’s East Aurora.

After Jabez Allen Jr.’s death in 1876, Dr. Allen gave up house calls but continued to see patients and operate his pharmacy until 1883, when he suffered a stroke. He then sold the store to Frederick W. Gardner, who moved it to a new building on Main Street, boasting globes of colored water and a soda fountain. Later, the store was renamed Cummings Pharmacy and, in 1946, Lorren E. Larwood, a graduate of University of Buffalo School of Pharmacy, purchased the business. It was relocated to Oakwood Avenue in 1988, where today’s Larwood Pharmacy is operated by pharmacists Rebecca Almond and Linda Andrews.

Jabez Allen died of a second stroke in 1885. The obituary in the East Aurora Advertiser described him as, “devoted to the welfare of those under his care and highly respected by his medical brethren in both the city and country.” Though greatly weakened in his last year of life, he “retained his interest in current affairs and was never deserted by the fortitude which had distinguished him throughout his life.”