At Home
‘Experience makes everyone a physician’.
William King (1650–1729), Archbishop of Dublin, 1715.[1]
Domestic medicine loomed large in early modern Europe: many cities and towns lacked trained physicians, apothecaries and surgeons, and a patient’s first ‘port of call’ was often not to professionals but rather to domestic healers in the home.[2] As Henry Cope (1686–1743), addressing his fellow physicians in Dublin in 1727, opined, treatments such as bleeding and purging were so familiar to members of the general public that they often attempted them themselves, rather than pay a physician: ‘Men are of late become so familiar with these dangerous Operations, that a Physician is seldom sent for, ‘till one or more of them have been perhaps once or twice repeated’.[3] Domestic medicine was not, however, limited to bleeding and purging, but encompassed a wide panoply of treatments. These were not only handed down through families via recipe books or shared with friends and the wider community, but also, crucially, benefited from the vernacular translations of key texts on the practice of medicine, which appeared in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Edward Worth (1676–1733), owned a number of these.
Christoph Wirsung, The general practise of physick … Compiled and written by the most famous and learned doctor Christopher Wirtzung, in the Germane tongue, and now translated into English in divers places corrected, and with many additions illustrated and augmented. By Jacob Mosan Germane … (London, 1654), title page.
Translations of texts on the practice of medicine by continental physicians such as Jean Riolan the younger (1580–1657), Lazare Rivière (1580–1655) and Cristopher Wirsung (1500?–71), were widely available – and, as Leong has shown, carefully read by practitioners of health care in the home in order to inform their practice of medicine.[4] Texts such as Wirsung’s The general practise of physic (London, 1654), were, as the name suggests, written as practical guides for just such an audience – and in his introduction Wirsung specifically drew attention to this function of his book:
‘In fine, this whole work was made, to the intent, that every good householder in the time of sicknesse, having neither Physitian nor Apothecaries near him, or at least none skilful in that Art, might himself know how to prepare and use any medicine that might serve for his disease, or what he might as best and meetest send for at the Apothecaries for his purpose. In like sort also may he judge of the properties and vertues of compounded or mixed medicines, as Electuaries, Syrupes, Pills, Powders, &c. and which of them in every disease might rightly be applied and used. Furthermore, I have very diligently observed and noted the just doses, proportion, or quantity of every medicine that is at one time to be used, and what things are to be avoided and shunned’.[5]
Studies by Leong and Rankin (among others) have explored just how such texts were read and how domestic medicine operated. By looking at diaries and correspondence, coupled with thousands of medical recipes in both print and manuscript, Leong has highlighted not only how individuals such as the Norfolk widow Elizabeth Freke (1641–1714), treated family members and friends and what sources she used, but has also pointed to the synergies between domestic and commercial medicine in the early modern period.[6] Common commercial medicines, such as ‘Daffy’s Elixir’ were used side by side with ‘cure alls’ such as ‘Hungary water’, which Freke (paraphrasing Moyse Charas’s The royal pharmacopoeia (London, 1678)), noted was ‘an Excelent Remidy for all cold distempers of the Brains And off the Nerves’, along with recipes handed down through her family via recipe books.[7] It is clear that vernacular translations of works such as Charas’ The royal pharmacopoeia and Wirsung’s The general practise of physic (London, 1654), were aimed not only at licensed practitioners but also this wider reading public.
Thomas Lupton, A thousand notable things of sundrie sorts. Whereof some are wonderfull, some strange, some pleasant, diuers necessary, a great sort profitable, and many verie precious (London, 1595), manuscript annotations on end papers.
The manuscript notes on Worth’s copy of Thomas Lupton’s A thousand notable things of sundrie sorts (London, 1595), reminds us that texts such as Lupton’s, as well as manuscript recipe books used in a domestic setting, covered a wide range of topics, not all medicinal in nature. In truth Lupton’s title was not far off, for recipe books likewise contained ‘a thousand notable things’, from cosmetic hints, cleaning tips, not to mention household cures. As Strocchia has noted, they were dynamic documents, which might be added to over time to include new cures and notes on what worked – and what did not.[8]
The focus on cures in the notes drawn up by the reader of Lupton’s work is understandable but it should also be remembered that, while domestic readers were naturally interested in cures for specific illnesses such as toothache, sciatica or kidney stones, they were also eager to prevent disease in the first place by advocating a healthy life style. As Strocchia argues, ‘Fostering healthy households emerged as a key concern of middling and élite female house-holders in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’.[9] Domestic healers were well acquainted with the Galenic 6 Non-Naturals of 1) Air; 2) food and drink; 3) exercise and rest; 4) sleep and wakefulness; 5) ingestion and excretion; and 6) mental affections; and were best placed to implement a healthy regimen in their household.[10]
John Gerard, The herball or Generall historie of plantes (London, 1633), title page.
Herbal remedies were particularly popular in domestic healing and works such as Gerard’s The herbal, proved to be vital texts for anybody interested in healing in the home.[11] Indeed, as Strocchia suggests, ‘Household advice manuals made clear that the ideal gentlewoman in seventeenth-century England could not fulfil her household duties without knowing ‘physic’ and the operations of herbs’.[12] Leong explores how women like Freke read and re-read texts like Gerard’s, making the text their own.[13] She draws attention to the fact that readers like Freke did not passively read a large text such as Gerard’s The herbal: instead they summarised it and used it in their own processes, thus engaging not only in ‘knowledge consumption but also knowledge production’.[14]
The majority of the wide range of medicaments used in early modern households concentrated on the use of herbs and spices, particularly rosemary, nutmeg and cinnamon.[15] This reliance on herbal medicines is not surprising – after all they were cheaper (and often less dangerous) than the chymical compounds of the apothecaries such as mercury, and some could be grown in a kitchen garden. Preparing herbal cordials might be time-consuming but allowed households to customize their own drugs.[16]
However, not all herbal recipes relied on what could be grown locally. Leong draws attention to the fact that domestic medicine also used imported spices and compound substances on sale in the wider medical marketplace.[17] Other preparations, such as salves, might be purchased at local apothecaries’s shops. Apothecaries provided not only previously prepared preparations, but also ingredients and information about how they might be used in the household, which might, in turn, be tested in practice by domestic healers.[18] Domestic medicine and commercial medicine were thus interwoven and, as Strocchia notes, ‘household medicine remained fully integrated with, rather than separate from, the wider medical economy’.[19]
Nicholas Culpeper, Culpeper’s school of physick, or, the experimental practice of the whole art … (London, 1696), frontispiece portrait and title page.
Leong’s work on the papers of Elizabeth Freke demonstrates that Gerard’s The herbal was a favourite text of women healers in the home. Alongside it were Nicholas Culpeper’s School of physic and his translation of Pharmacopoeia Londinensis, and pharmacopoeias by both Moyse Charas (1619–98) and George Bates (1608–68). Culpeper (1616–54), was an especially popular author and his many works were eagerly read by domestic healers. Leong draws attention to one such reader, Margaret Boscawen (d. 1688), who looked not to Gerard’s The herbal for information but to Culpeper’s The English Physitian Enlarged (London, 1653). Culpeper’s herbal was widely popular because it focused on plants that were grown locally, presented them in alphabetical order, and provided explanations for ‘the very Ground and Foundation of physic’.[20]
As the title page of Worth’s copy of Culpeper’s school of physick (London, 1696) makes clear, Culpeper offered his readers a wide array of medical information: herbal medicine, chymical cures, surgical procedures and information about diet. Worth’s 1696 edition included a life of the author, an approbation from his wife Alice Field (b. 1625), and a preface which was addressed to ‘All Students in Physick, Chirurgery, and Chimistry’. It is clear that this was meant in the broadest sense for Culpeper had tried his best to break the monopoly of both apothecaries and physicians by sharing pharmaceutical knowledge with the general public in works such as his A Physicall Directory, or, A Translation of the London Dispensatory (London, 1649).[21] His many disagreements with the Royal College of Physicians are too famous to need repetition here.[22] The popularity of works such as Culpeper’s Culpeper’s school of physick, or, the experimental practice of the whole art … (London, 1696), reminds us that domestic medicine was not limited to the use of herbal medicines and at times domestic healers, sourcing ingredients from apothecaries, explored the world of early modern pharmacy.[23] In addition, in Ireland, Kelly points to the increased availability of patent medicine in the 1720s (such as the celebrated ‘Daffy’s Elixir’) – a development which further encouraged self-diagnosis in the home.[24] The dearth of physicians and hospitals in early modern Ireland made domestic medicine sometimes the only route to health. There were, however, real dangers inherent in this approach. As Kelly notes, the decision of Jonathan Swift’s father to take mercury to treat his ‘scabies’ was probably directly responsible for his death.[25]
Domestic healers, many of whom were female, thus ‘combined information gained from private and public spheres and domestic and commercial medical practices’.[26] Books such as Wirsung’s The general practise of physick … (London, 1654), Lupton’s A thousand notable things of sundrie sorts (London, 1595), Gerard’s The herball or Generall historie of plantes (London, 1633), and Culpeper’s school of physick, or, the experimental practice of the whole art … (London, 1696), not only introduced non-licensed healers to the main trends in the practice of medicine in early modern Europe: they also implicitly encouraged experimentation, empowering householders to take matters into their own hands when no suitably qualified physician, apothecary or surgeon was available.
Text: Dr Elizabethanne Boran, Librarian of the Edward Worth Library, Dublin.
Sources
Cope, Henry, Medicina Vindicata: or, Reflections on Bleeding, Vomiting and Purging, in the Beginning of Fevers, Small Pox, Pleurisies, and other Acute Diseases (Dublin, 1727).
Culpeper, Nicholas, Culpeper’s school of physick, or, the experimental practice of the whole art … (London, 1696).
Curry, Patrick, ‘Culpeper, Nicholas (1616–1654), physician and astrologer’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB).
Gerard, John, The herball or Generall historie of plantes (London, 1633).
Kelly, James, ‘‘Bleeding, vomiting and purging’: The Medical Response to Ill-health in Eighteenth-century Ireland’, in Cox, Catherine and Maria Luddy (eds), Cultures of care in Irish medical history, 1750–1970 (Basingstoke, 2010), pp 13–36.
Kelly, James, ‘Domestic Medication and Medical Care in Late Early Modern Ireland’, in Kelly, James, and Fiona Clark (eds), Ireland and Medicine in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Farnham, 2010), pp 109–35.
Leong, Elaine, ‘Making Medicines in the Early Modern Household’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 82, no. 1 (2008), 145–68.
Leong, Elaine, ‘‘Herbals she peruseth’: reading medicine in early modern England’, Renaissance Studies, 28, no. 4 (2014), 556–78.
Leong, Elaine and Alisha Rankin, ‘Testing Drugs and Trying Cures’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 91, no. 2 (2017), 157–82.
Leong, Elaine, ‘Learning medicine by the book: reading and writing surgical manuals in early modern London’, British Journal for the History of Science, 5 (2020), 93–110.
Lupton, Thomas, A thousand notable things of sundrie sorts. Whereof some are wonderfull, some strange, some pleasant, diuers necessary, a great sort profitable, and many verie precious (London, 1595).
Pelling, Margaret, ‘“Thoroughly Resented?” Older Women and the Medical Role in early Modern London’, in Hunter, Lynette and Sarah Hutton (eds), Women, Science and Medicine 1500–1700 (Stroud, 1997), pp 23–53.
Stobart, Anne, Household Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England (London and New York, 2016).
Strocchia, Sharon T., ‘Women and healthcare in early modern Europe’, Renaissance Studies, 28, no. 4 (2014), 496–514.
Wirsung, Christoph, The general practise of physick … Compiled and written by the most famous and learned doctor Christopher Wirtzung, in the Germane tongue, and now translated into English in divers places corrected, and with many additions illustrated and augmented. By Jacob Mosan Germane … (London, 1654).
Wooley, Benjamin, The herbalist: Nicholas Culpeper and the fight for medical freedom (Toronto, 2004).
[1] Quoted in Kelly, James, ‘Domestic Medication and Medical Care in Late Early Modern Ireland’, in Kelly, James, and Fiona Clark (eds), Ireland and Medicine in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Farnham, 2010), p. 115.
[2] Pelling, Margaret, ‘“Thoroughly Resented?” Older Women and the Medical Role in early Modern London’, in Hunter, Lynette and Sarah Hutton (eds), Women, Science and Medicine 1500–1700 (Stroud, 1997), p. 70.
[3] Cope, Henry, Medicina Vindicata: or, Reflections on Bleeding, Vomiting and Purging, in the Beginning of Fevers, Small Pox, Pleurisies, and other Acute Diseases (Dublin, 1727), p. 8.
[4] Leong, Elaine, ‘‘Herbals she peruseth’: reading medicine in early modern England’, Renaissance Studies, 28, no. 4 (2014), 556–78.
[5] Wirsung, Christoph, The general practise of physick … Compiled and written by the most famous and learned doctor Christopher Wirtzung, in the Germane tongue, and now translated into English in divers places corrected, and with many additions illustrated and augmented. By Jacob Mosan Germane … (London, 1654), p. 6.
[6] On this see Leong, Elaine, ‘Making Medicines in the Early Modern Household’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 82, no. 1 (2008), 145–68.
[7] Ibid., 153–4.
[8] Strocchia, Sharon T., ‘Women and healthcare in early modern Europe’, Renaissance Studies, 28, no. 4 (2014), 500.
[9] Ibid., 499.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Leong, ‘Herbals she peruseth’, 561.
[12] Strocchia, ‘Women and healthcare in early modern Europe’, 506.
[13] Leong, ‘Herbals she peruseth’, 556–78.
[14] Ibid., 568.
[15] Leong, ‘Making Medicines in the Early Modern Household’, 159.
[16] Ibid., 165.
[17] Ibid., 161.
[18] Leong, Elaine and Alisha Rankin, ‘Testing Drugs and Trying Cures’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 91, no. 2 (2017), 159.
[19] Strocchia, ‘Women and healthcare in early modern Europe’, 498.
[20] Leong, ‘Herbals she peruseth’, 569.
[21] Curry, Patrick, ‘Culpeper, Nicholas (1616–1654), physician and astrologer’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB).
[22] See ibid., and also Wooley, Benjamin, The herbalist: Nicholas Culpeper and the fight for medical freedom (Toronto, 2004).
[23] Strocchia, ‘Women and healthcare in early modern Europe’, 505.
[24] Kelly, James, ‘‘Bleeding, vomiting and purging’: The Medical Response to Ill-health in Eighteenth-century Ireland’, in Cox, Catherine and Maria Luddy (eds), Cultures of care in Irish medical history, 1750–1970 (Basingstoke, 2010), p. 13.
[25] Kelly, ‘Domestic Medication and Medical Care in Late Early Modern Ireland’, p. 113.
[26] Leong, ‘Making Medicines in the Early Modern Household’, 153.