21. Prescription Book

This 1894 prescription book is composed of loose sheets bound with thread through punched holes. Most of the prescriptions from Rockville and Washington physicians seem to have been filled on Montgomery Avenue at “Bruce Thomas & Co., Druggists, Directly Opposite Court House, Rockville, Maryland.” Even today physicians and dentists issue paper prescriptions to patients, but paper scrip has largely been supplanted by orders submitted to pharmacies by telephone or email.

Some of the prescriptions were issued by Dr. Edward Elisha Stonestreet (1830-1903), a Montgomery County native educated at the University of Maryland Medical School in Baltimore, 1850-1852. The frame building that Dr. Stonestreet used as his office for half a century, 1852-1903, is now located on the Beall-Dawson House grounds, where it is administered by Montgomery History as the Stonestreet Medical Museum.

Other prescribers include Dr. Otis Mills Linthicum (1866-1926), who had married Stonestreet’s daughter Ella, Dr. Edward Anderson (1841-1917), and Dr. Charles J. Maddox (1818-1899), all of Rockville, as well as Dr. W. Thawley Pratt of Potomac. From Washington physicians, there was scrip from Dr. E. Oliver Belt (1861-1906), a Washington eye doctor with a Dickerson home, and pioneer woman doctor Amelia Erbach (1860-?).

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