“Bite the Bullet,” Washington’s Headquarters’ Program on Revolutionary era medicine, is designed to acquaint audiences with the state of medical knowledge and some of the practices of medicine in the time of George Washington. Physicians were frequently confounded by the causes of illness, treated symptoms, and relied heavily on the healing powers of nature. Many remedies stocked by apothecaries were herbal in nature, and the best doctors of the time still healed with herbs. In 1775, the US had 3,500 doctors, but only 300 had medical degrees. The profession of physician / surgeon was open only to men, but the system relied heavily on women who could be and were midwives. The lecture quotes from the diary of traveling midwife, Martha Ballard, of northern Massachusetts who kept a record of her work as a healer and a midwife, which provides an unparalleled window into practical medicine in the quarter century straddling 1800.