Dr. Nicholas de Belleville

1753-1831

I was a Frenchman who was a physician for the Patriots during the war.

I was born in Metz, France, in 1753, and studied medicine for seven years. There I meant the Polish Count Casimir Pulaski, who was going to America to help in the struggle for independence, and I decided to go along with him. When we arrived in America, I was commissioned a Continental army surgeon.

In the winter of 1778, we went to Trenton where Pulaski’s cavalry brigade was assigned winter quarters. Each day I would walk to the stone Old Barracks which was serving as a Continental Army hospital, and I cared for the soldiers.

That spring Pulaski was ordered south and I went with him. But in the fall, I received an urgent message from Dr. William Bryant, with whom I had lived in Trenton, asking me to come back and help him as his career was ending. I returned to Trenton, took up his practice and lived in the tavern of Mrs. Charity Britton. On January 10, 1780, I married her daughter Ann.

I treated patients in Trenton for the next 50 years. On December 17th, 1831, I was suffering from the flu, when my nurse checked on me to find that my candle had gone out. I asked her to get me another, and when she returned with it, she found that I had died.

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