The picture shows the Lewes Town Model, a joint project by Lewes Town Council and Sussex Archeological Society, accompanied by an audio-visual programme which allows you to relive Lewes's thousand-year history. The Lewes Town Model and Living History Centre is located next to Barbican House Museum of Archeology in Castle Place off the High Street and next to Lewes Castle. The Centre and Lewes Castle (which dates from just after the Norman Conquest in the 11th century) are open from March/April to October.
Lewes, a market town about eight miles (14 km) north east of the city of Brighton, is the administrative capital of East Sussex. It was here that Richard Russell was born on 26th November 1687.
Richard Russell came from a medical family. His father, Dr Nathaniel Russell, was both a surgeon and a chemist (licensed to prescribe medicines) and his grandfather also practised medicine.
Richard Russell went to school in Lewes at St Anne's Free Grammar School. He was secretly married to the only daughter of Mr William Kempe, a rich nobleman who lived at South Malling Deanery. Richard Russell went on to study medicine at the University of Leiden, near the west coast of Holland. After graduating from the Dutch university as a doctor of medicine in 1724, he went to work as a physician at St Thomas's Hospital, London (near Trafalgar Square). He was then made a Fellow of the Royal Society. As Dr Richard Russell MD,FRS, he returned to practise medicine in his native Lewes. By this time, his father-in-law, William Kempe, had died and Richard Russell was able to live at South Malling Deanery. He had also specialized in the therapeutic uses of sea water, which he found useful in curing a variety of diseases. He went on to gain a reputation for his "sea-water cure" and this enabled him to make poor old Brighton into a fashionable seaside resort.
Practitioners at St Thomas's Hospital London are still looking for new ways of managing pain and treating diseases. The hospital currently has one of the best managed Pain Management Programmes in Britain. Richard Russell's oral prescription of woodlice and sea-water is no longer taken, but hydrotherapy (exercise in water) has an important part to play in pain management. Neurologists now inject substances like Botulinum Toxin to provide therapy for a variety of conditions ranging from Parkinson's Disease to Painful Moving Leg & Toe. Dr Richard specialized in treating diseases of the glands, but also recognised the benefits of physical exercise for people leading sedentary lives. He believed in the therapeutic value of the iodine in sea-water and the medicines he gave his patients to drink included ingredients such as cuttle fish bones, crab's eyes, tar and burnt sponge. Psychological theories were yet to gain support. The mental illness of King George III, whose reign (1760-1820) began one year after Richard Russell's death, was described as "madness". It is unkown whether Dr Russell considered "the placebo effect" of his strange prescriptions.