Explore how everyday people living in eighteenth-century England dealt with sickness, accidents, and disease in this unpublished kitchen book from 1737. Bridget Lane, a typical British housewife and lady of the house, treated her family for the physical ills that befell them. She gathered more than 150 cures and remedies, compiling them along with her unique insights into healing principles and practices of the time. Edited with detailed commentary by Vincent DiMarco, a longtime scholar of medieval literature, this text examines how Bridget Lane's cures relate to folk- and herbal medicine traditions, whether recipes preserved vestiges of magic and spiritual healing, details on ingredients and their effects, and ways certain recipes have been adapted to the modern kitchen. Based on a comprehensive analysis of how the people of the eighteenth-century understood ailments, Mrs. Lane's guide and the attendant commentary is intended for students, lovers of history, and anyone interested in the social sciences. Join an eighteenth-century housewife and discover all she did in the kitchen to protect and help her family with It Has Helped to Admiration.
It Has Helped to Admiration
Eighteenth-Century Medical Cures from the Kitchen Book of Bridget Lane, 1737By Vincent DiMarcoiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2010 Vincent DiMarco
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4502-5626-1Contents
Acknowledgments....................................................................xiiiList of Illustrations..............................................................xvPreface............................................................................xviiIntroduction.......................................................................xxiTable of Contents: Medical, Veterinary, and Household Receipts.....................xliMedical Receipts...................................................................1Text and Commentary, 1.1-1.148.....................................................1Veterinary Receipts................................................................209Text and Commentary, 2.1-2.5.......................................................209Household Receipts.................................................................211Text and Commentary, 3.1-3.4.......................................................211Table of Contents: Culinary Receipts...............................................217Culinary Receipts..................................................................221Appendix A: Textual Notes and Emendations..........................................281Appendix B: Weights and Measures with Metric Conversions...........................285Appendix C: Bridget Lane's Inventory of Household Linens, etc......................289Appendix D: Culinary Receipts Omitted from This Edition............................291Bibliography.......................................................................295Index..............................................................................329
Chapter One
1.1 For a Sore Throat. It Was Told Me As Infalible
Rub some in a bason. Pour some of the best crab vinegar on them. Receive the steam through the pip of a tundish. Make use of it several times in the day.
A black ribon dip'd in spirit of hartshorn, rub about the neck. As it drys, wet it again.
A strong decoction of garden carrots to gargel a throat that is sore. I know a person always finds relief by making use of it.
A sore throat can be caused by many factors, e.g., viruses, bacteria such as Streptococcus, sinus drainage, breathing through the mouth, and the yeast fungus Candida albicans. The latter is a normal constituent of the human flora which can lead to thrush (a contagious disease, occurring most frequently in infants and children, characterized by small whitish eruptions on the throat, mouth, and tongue). It is not surprising, of course, that household books like this one contain numerous remedies for a common ailment like a sore throat—see also 1.3 and 1.75—and likewise that Bridget Lane here offers a number of therapies under one heading (although this is not her regular practice).
Hops(Humulus iupulus), native to the temperate northern hemisphere and cultivated in Europe from the eighteenth century (seventeenth century in North America), are high in methylbutenol, which has a mild sedative effect on the central nervous system. This was apparently recognized in traditional and folk medicine, which often called for hop tea for insomnia and a pillow of hops for comfort and easing of stress. George III reputedly used such a pillow to relieve symptoms of porphyria (www.henriettesherbal.com/eclectic/pereira/humulus.html) and the Delaware Indians heated a small bag of hop leaves to relieve earache and toothache (www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/duke_energy/ humulus_lupulus.html). Hops also appear to possess antibacterial qualities, and an infusion of hops in alcohol is today used by some as a topical treatment for bedsores and other ailments. A southern American folk cure from the eighteenth century (Moss 1999, 67), To Cure a Sore Throat tho a Quindsey (i.e., a quinsy, for which see 1.3), makes the hops do double duty, in both steam and a poultice:
Take a handful of hops, steep it in spirits, and apply a common funnel to the liquid. Let the patient apply the funnel to his throat and thereby absorb the steam. Let the hops be applied like a poultice.
Crab vinegar is made from crab apples (the fruit of any of several deciduous trees of the genus Malus).
A tundish is a vessel with a tube at the bottom—here, corresponding to the pip (obsolete variant of pipe) that fit into the bung hole of a tun or cask and formed a kind of funnel.
For whatever reason, a black ribon (i.e., ribbon) was a popular treatment for sore throat, often employed as a prophylactic against the ailment. Hultin 1975, 354, cites the diary of pastor James Woodforde of Norfolk (6 May 1790), in which he records the purchase of eighteen yards (!) of black ribbon, "designed to put round our Necks to prevent sore throats." Janos 1990, 31, quotes a recollection of black silk ribbons on the neck "for croup" in twentieth-century Massachusetts.
Spirit of hartshorn is an aqueous solution of ammonia, manufactured from the horns and hooves of red deer. Colorless and pungent, it consisted of about 28 percent ammonia gas.
A decoction is an extract or concentration of something produced by boiling (from Latin decoctus, past participle of decoquere, 'to boil down to the dregs' [de- (intensive) + coquere, 'to cook']).
Carrots (Daucas carota) were likewise employed in eighteenthcentury America in a gargle for sore throat (Moss 1999, 67):
Scrape or grate the outside of carrots in a mug, & pour on the Gratings boiling water. Cover it Close and let it stand until cold, [gargle] well and often.
1.2 Where the Severall Sorts of Herbs Grow of Which the Plague Water Is Made of Potherbs
In the court orchard agrimony and burnet, on the 2 sides of the banke. In the park that belongs to Thomas Cornwall, Esquire, are scabious and mugwort; videlicet, round the nursery house, betony on the left hand [of] the house from Tenbury, that is to say the nursery; centery, wilde thyme, bugbean and tormintle by the way side as you go to the same house. Under the out side [of] the parsonage hedge belonging to Edmund Edwards grows avens. In the way to Mr Saberys at the colledge is verven and also about those meadows ajoyning in Mr Mansfield fold of Burford, white archangle. On Feambridge and under the chancell wall grows pellitory of the wall and mercury—the mercury is on the west end of the church in Timberlegs of the swan; close adjoyning to the south end of his house there is also verven under Timberlegs garden pales. Next [to] the road is stinkeing hoar hound and about the same is mullet. At Haylys of Burford in the cr[o]ft beyond the house end grow elecompane and allso in many other places about Care Bridge, and [in] most of the dunghills in town grows stinkeing orage.
Plague (from Old French plage, 'a stroke or wound' and Latin plaga, 'stroke', but compare the Late Latin use of the word for 'pestilence') is the name of the bacterial disease considered by most researchers to be caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, recently reclassified as a member of the Enterobacteriaceae family. Plague is an infection of the lymphatic system, usually caused by the bite of an infected flea whose guts have become blocked by the bacterium after feeding on an infected host, and which then regurgitates the bacteria, spreading the disease, as it attempts to feed elsewhere. The best-known manifestation of the disease is referred to as bubonic plague, where the infection enters through the skin, travels through the lymphatic system, and causes painful swellings of the lymph glands, called buboes, primarily in the groin, neck, and armpits. Dark patches of skin, rashes and pustules, sometimes due to hemorraghing, are also manifestations. Less frequently, the organism can enter through the skin by direct contact with tissue or body fluids of a plague-infected animal. A pneumonic form of the plague, in which the lungs are attacked before the rest of the body, can also be transmitted by inhaling infected droplets that have been expelled through coughing. If the disease infects the blood (with virtually 100 percent fatal results) it is known as septacaemic plague.
The plague, referred to in English until the sixteenth century as "the mortality," "the death," and most commonly, "the pestilence," ravaged Europe from the time of its first catastrophic appearance in 1348–49 through the next three centuries, with the Great Plague of London in 1665–66 and the Great Plague of Vienna (1679) generally recognized as the last of its last major outbreaks. (Some recent commentators, e.g., Twigg 1984, Scott and Duncan 2001, Cohn 2002, examining rates of mortality, seasonality, and contemporary descriptions of the fourteenth-century pandemic, have questioned its identification with bubonic plague, but see Theilmann and Cate 2007.) The so-called Third Pandemic—assuming that the Plague of Justinian, 541–42 C.E. marked its first significant appearance—began in China in the mid-nineteenth century and spread to all inhabited continents. No longer found in Europe, plague is distributed in Asia (from the Caucasus Mountains in Russia, through much of the Middle East, eastwards through China and southwards to S.W. and S.E. Asia), in Africa (from Uganda southwards on the eastern side of the continent and in southern Africa), in South America (the Andean mountain region and Brazil) and North America (from the Pacific coast eastwards to the western great plains, and from British Columbia and Alberta south to Mexico).
Today, patients with plague who are promptly diagnosed and treated with various of the aminoglycosides and tetracyclines, and ciprofloxacin, a flouroquinolone, can expect to be cured.
Writing in the plague year 1666, Thomas Willis 1685 ed., 592, described plague thus:
an Epidemious Disease, contagious, very destructive to Mankind, taking its Rise from a venemous Miasm first received by the Air, afterward propagated by Contagion, which setting upon Men after a hidden and secret manner, causes Extinctions of the Spirits, Coagulations of the Blood, Syderations [i.e., paralysis] and Mortifications of it, and of the solid Parts, and brings the Diseased in danger of Life, with an Appearance of Pushes, Bubo's, or Carbuncles, and with the addition of other horrible Symptoms.
This miasma (i.e., noxious atmosphere), full of pestilent particles, could be treated, Willis thought, by blood-letting, cauteries, and amulets composed of poisonous materials such as arsenic, quicksilver, and the powder of toads, all of which substances "excellently agree with those Corpuscles of the Poyson coming to them, and readily close with them." He concluded, "They gather into themselves the Seeds of the Pestilence coming against us, by reason of a Similitude of Parts; nay, and by drawing the same from our Body to their Embraces, they in some sort free the Infected from the Malignity" (1685 ed., 597).
Eighteenth-century medicine considered plague a "pestilential fever," which differed from other contagious, malignant fevers (see 1.137) in its acute intensity. It was thought to arise from poisonous miasma, nonnative to England but brought from Eastern countries; this miasma, when swallowed along with air, "insinuates itself in the salival juice, where its tragedy is first acted. Whence it assaults the head, brain, nerves, and animal spirits," and produces torpor, heaviness, violent pain, and loss of strength. It would then proceed to the stomach, to cause nausea, loathing of food, vomiting, etc., thence "to the membranes of the spinal marrow and the coats of the arteries, producing horrors, a languid, small, contracted, quick pulse, and even fainting." Unless the poison were expelled from the body "by the strength of the vital motons, by buboes and carbuncles," it would be fatal (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1771, 3:71). It was thought necessary to treat the eruptions as soon as possible, first by cupping, then through the use of a suppurating poultice or warm plaster. Buboes and carbuncles that would not suppurate would have to be opened by incision, then carefully bathed with a fomentation of warm aromatic plants; in this the Encyclopaedia's advice echoes that of the eminent and respected Dr. Richard Mead in his Discourse on the Plague (Mead 1765, 2:93).
Learned opinion declared that with regard to such pestilential fevers, "few medicines are best," and that there was a real danger in administering hot volatile oils or spirits, as they would "fix the poison upon the nervous parts." But some herbs and roots, if mixed with acids, were not to be eschewed, e.g., a mixture of carduus benedictus water and wine vinegar, with a little crabs-eyes and theriaca (see 1.41), which was thought successful in an outbreak at Halle, in central Germany, in 1682.
Receipts for plague water, administered either as a prophylatic or treatment, remained common long after the last major outbreaks of the disease in England, especially since such receipts were thought effective against other ailments. Cooper 1757, 169, offers seven different receipts, though he was quick to point out that some of the ingredients in receipts he included, like centery (i.e., centaury, Erythraea centaurium) in our receipt above, and carduus in 1.19, below, "added no Virtue at all to the Water." In a postscript he notes that plague water "is a noble Alexipharmic [i.e., remedy against poison and sickness] ... in malignant cases," but was also of great use in "lowness of Spirits, and Depressions." Likewise, the seventeenth-century Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery (Hess 1981, 407) notes that the plague water receipt is also good against "surfits, or any other sickness" and is "very good for convulsion fits." Martha Bradley, writing in 1756, says that "it is good in all Disorders of the Stomach, and to be taken when a Person is going into a Room where any Person is ill of a contagious Disorder, or otherwise into a bad Air" (1996–98 facsim., 2:273) And Smith 1758, 269, adds to her version of Dr. Burgess' Antidote against the Plague the statement that "it is good likewise against the small-pox, or any other pestilential disease."
The plague had been treated for centuries with a variety of (often bizarre and almost certainly ineffectual) prophylactics, "remedies" and nostrums, among which were the herbal water prescribed for the poor in the much copied treatise of John of Burgundy (1365), which calls for a distilled water made from dittany, pimpernel, tormentil and scabious, with a pennyweight of camphor added if the patient were choleric or sanguine, and administered in doses of six spoonfuls every twentyfour hours from the perceived onset of the disease. A powder was also recommended, either to be rubbed on the tumors or drunk mixed with wine, composed of St. John's wort, dittany, tormentil, scabious, philadelphia (i.e., philadelphus), amoniac, and Lemnian earth (Horrox 1994, 188, 190). The numerous complex distillations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries largely derived from the College of Physicians' response to Charles II's call for guidance during the Great Plague of 1665, as printed by Hodges 1721, 170:
Take the roots of Tormintil, Angelica, Peony, Zedoarie, Liquorish, Elacampane, of each half an ounce, the leaves of Sage, Scordium, Celandine, Rue, Rosemary, Wormwood, Ros solis, Mugwort, Burnet, Dragons, Scabious, Agrimony, Baum, Carduus, Betony, Centery the less, Marygolds leaves and flowers, of each one handfull; Let them all be cut, bruised, and infused three days in eight pints of White wine in the moneth of May, and distilled.
Four years after the Great Plague, most of the same ingredients appear in one of two receipts for Plague Water in Sir Kenelm's famous Closet (Digby 1997 ed., 122):
Take Rue, Agrimony, Wormwood, Celandine, Sage, Balm, Mugwort, Dragons, Pimpernel, Marygold, Fetherfew, Burnet, Sorrel, and Elicampane-roots scraped and sliced small. Scabious, Wood-betony, Brown-mayweed, Mints, Avence, Tormentil, Carduus benedictus, and Rosemary as much as of anything else, and Angelica if you will. You must have like weight of all them, except Rosemary aforesaid, which you must have twice as much of as of any of the rest; then mingle them altogether and shred them very small; then steep them in the best White-wine you can get, three days and three nights, stirring them once or twice a day, putting no more wine then will cover the Herbs well; then still it in a Common-still; and take not too much of the first water, and but a little of the second, according as you feel the strength, else it will be sower. There must be but half so much Elicampane as of the rest.
Bridget Lane's receipt, which in its clear directions to local landmarks supplies the manuscript's provenance, bears little resemblance to 1.19, Plague Water, which may well have been copied from a printed source.
Agrimony (Agrimonia eupatoria), a member of the rose order of plants, was esteemed for various medicinal uses, viz., to purify the blood, to heal snakebites, warts, and wounds. Galen described it as hot and moderately dry, saying that a decoction of its leaves was good for those with "naughty livers." Turner 1551, 1:314, noted that "[t]he leaves of this broken and laid to with swine's grease, heal sores that are hard to be cured and covered with a skin." It is no longer recognized for any vulnerary virtues but is still appreciated as a mild astringent and tonic (Grieve 1992, 14). Hill 1751, 446, noted that by his time it had passed out of use as a cephalic (i.e., relief for disorders of the head).
Burnet (Sanguisorba officinalis) was praised by Culpeper 1794, 57, as a "special help to defend the heart from noisome vapours, and from infection of the pestilence, the juice thereof being taken in some drink, and the party laid to sweat thereupon."
(Continues...)
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