I.T. Walton account book

Unprocessed Material — Folder: 1

Identifier: ViU-2023-0187

Staff Only

Content Description

This collection contains an account book of a Virginia dentist, Dr. I.T. Walton, who worked in Appomattox, Prince Edward, Charlotte, Mecklenburg, and Albemarle Counties. The book recorded services for white, enslaved, and free Black patients between 1857 and 1861. The account book documents procedures, tooth conditions, and overall health assessment of patients and includes prices for cleanings, toothache drops, "gold plugs," and various "temporary" and "amalgam" fillings, as well as for "extracting" teeth and "fangs," resetting teeth, and occasionally "killing nerve[s]." Each entry records the name of the patient and, if different, the name of the person paying the bill. Most of the volume proceeds chronologically, though Walton regularly returns to entries to record later work on the same patient. Walton delineates race within his account book, with forty individuals referred to as either "negro" or "negress". Walton notes two Black patients as free, and the rest were evidently enslaved. No mention of the Civil War appears, dating the book to very early 1861 at its extent. A few entries note Walton's renting rooms- evidence of an itinerant practice- while others, apparently from Key West, Florida, indicate that he spent some time there in the late 1850s. A few early pages contain dental account entries from 1857 through 1859, and some twenty pages at the end contain brief entries on Walton's personal and dental accounts from 1857 to 1861. A number of poems, some apparently authored by Walton, are interspersed between dental entries.