The Virginia Company was concerned about maintaining the health and well-being of the men it was sending to its new colony in Virginia. In the first year of settlement eight medical men were included among the colonists. These included two physicians, four surgeons (called chirurgians), and two apothecaries. Evidence of these medically-trained men has been found archaeologically in the way of their medicines and tools to treat the sick and injured. But their tools and skills didn’t prevent the high rate of death in the colony. By January 1608, 60 percent of the original colonists had died. It appears that in this time before the medical understanding of bacteria, the doctors weren’t prepared for the strange “swellings, Flixes, and Burneing fevers” that afflicted the men. The New World posed a whole set of new problems. In the words of colonist William Strachey, Jamestown had few “skillful surgeons who knew how to apply the right medicine in a new country.”