Category Archives: Ailments, Disease, Illness, and Injury

Movember: Men’s Health in Eighteenth-Century Recipe Collections

By: Katherine Allen

November (or ‘Movember’) is men’s health  awareness month, and it focuses on prostate cancer and depression, with the added bonus of moustaches. Movember didn’t exist in the eighteenth century, but I’m curious about men’s health awareness from a recipe book perspective. What can recipe books tell us about the family’s role in providing care, and recording remedies for men?

movember-moustache
Movember: Men’s Health Awareness Month

The manuscripts I consult contain mostly non-gender specific illnesses (e.g. coughs and stomach complaints), and many include recipes for women and children; this is because these manuscripts were written by women and were family collections. There are, however, occasional references to men’s illness experiences.

Remedies for the prostate gland/ cancer don’t exist in recipe books (at least not in modern terminology). The prostate was not anatomically-defined until the late eighteenth century, and the medical interventions that developed were surgical, with John Hunter’s use of catheters being an example of treatment for an enlarged prostate.

If we look broadly at urinogenital recipes, we find men’s illnesses (on male infertility see Jennifer Evans). Urinogenital remedies were standard in domestic recipe books. These include recipes for bloody urine, stones, and difficulty urinating. In Esther Hanmer’s mid-century recipe book[1], a recipe titled ‘Given my Father. For one yt cannot make water either child or Old body’ said to take bees and stamp them, then add them to white wine and posset ale. Although it is unclear if it was used by the father, his donation of this remedy indicates a man’s awareness of urinogenital issues and potential treatment, and his sharing of medical advice with his family.

esther-hanmer-ms-p-17
For one yt cannot make water. MS. 2767. Image Credit: Wellcome Library

Similarly, Sir Thomas Mannering sent the compiler’s grandfather a remedy for sharpness of urine where a piece of antimony was infused in ale. This sharpness could be any infection, but the term frequently appeared in medical literature as a symptom of gonorrhea. Esther Hanmer’s family recipe collection thus documents men acquiring medical advice from their networks and subsequently sharing it as a component of the family’s health record and for potential future use.

esther-hanmer-ms-p-29
Against Sharpness of Urine. MS. 2767. Image Credit: Wellcome Library

Though the grandfather’s recipe does not specifically mention gonorrhea, venereal diseases were a pervasive complaint for eighteenth-century men. The absence of explicit venereal disease remedies in domestic collections is partly due to the immorality and stigma associated with the disorders. Lisa Smith has noted that recipes for ‘weak backs’ and ‘running of the reins’ (genital discharge) were linked to venereal diseases and genital ‘leakage’, suggesting that treatment for sexually transmitted infections was present in recipe books, but catalogued under more ambiguous names.[2] For instance, a late seventeenth-century collection cites a water-based remedy for a canker ‘in the yard of a man’, indicating that recipes books had remedies for suspected venereal disorders, though they were not labelled as such.[3]

Manuscript recipe books were important for documenting the whole family’s health, and the family played a central role in communicating, preserving, and utilising medical knowledge when caring for male members. Baron James Everard Arundell’s and his wife’s recipe collections are two of the few family manuscripts I have looked at that were compiled by a male family member. Many of the recipes are recorded as being specifically for Arundell, including a recommendation for Dicherion’s white Drops for Palsy, which was given to him by Lady Arundell, and which he purchased from Mr Collins – a bookseller at Salisbury.[4]

arundell-ms
Drops for James Arundell’s Palsy. MS 2667/12/40. Image Credit: Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre

Royal gardener Henry Wise corresponded regularly with Dr. Cheyne (see Spa post) and one of his recurring health conditions was  sickness when travelling. One recipe was to ‘Stop Purging when upon the Road from Bath’ from Dr. Cheyne[5], while the family’s other manuscript has a record of Mr Southill’s directions for him for ‘occasion of motion extraordinary’.[6]

Eighteenth-century elite men were invested in maintaining their health and seeking treatment– this is no surprise given the wealth of sources documenting men consuming medicine and their seeking advice from the medical professions. What is significant is that recipe books served as important records for men’s medical interactions and medical knowledge for treating men as part of the domestic medicine tradition. Some men recorded their experiences directly; in other cases it was female relations who documented their experiences and wanted (or were expected) to be knowledgeable in maintaining their men’s health as part of family care.

[1] Wellcome Library, MS.2767. Esther Hanmer and others, ‘Receipt Book’ (c. 1750–1825), pp. 17, 29.

[2] Lisa Wynne Smith, ‘The Body Embarrassed? Rethinking the Leaky Male Body in Eighteenth-Century England and France’, Gender & History, 23 (2011), pp. 26–46.

[3] British Library, Add MS 38089. Collection of Medical Recipes, p. 108v.

[4] Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, 2667/12/40. Mrs J.E. Arundell, ‘Book of medicinal recipes’ (1786), Arundell of Wardour, p. 111.

[5] Warwickshire Record Office, CR0341/300. Wise family, ‘Volume containing assorted Wise family records and recipes’ (1716–8), Wise family of Woodcote, p. 119.

[6] CR0341/301. Mary Wise, ‘Recipe book of Mary Wise’ (18th C.), Wise family of Woodcote, p. 86.

 

Hang Your Head: Mrs. Corlyon’s Unique Headache Treatment

Jennifer Sherman Roberts

One of the most challenging tasks in deciphering early modern medical recipes is knowing what illness the recipe is meant to treat. Some recipes address recognizable conditions: cancer, miscarriage, bruises. Some are for diseases whose names have changed significantly: the king’s evil (scrofula), the bloody flux (dysentery), consumption (tuberculosis). And some seem plain enough at first but then reveal confounding and intriguing details.

One such example is in the recipe book of Mrs. Corlyon (Wellcome MS.213), “The trew cause whence many of the Paines of the heade do proceeded, how to know those paines and the Reameadyes for them.” This recipe first caught my eye because of its sheer length—at almost two full pages, it is one of the longest I’ve seen. But it isn’t just length that sets this recipe apart; it seems to be somehow qualitatively different from the standard recipe form.

At first the recipe is straightforward enough–headache treatments are common in early modern recipe books (some great examples from Jennifer Evans can be found here at the Early Modern Medicine blog).

While most recipes begin with simple, prescriptive directions (“boil ye rosemary…” for example, or “take ye dung of cowes…”), this recipe immediately provides an almost academic discussion of the causes of this particular headache:

One of the principall causes whence many of the paines of the Heade do proceede is the opening of the heade the which doth happen comounly by one of these three meanes viz. By over much moisture beying about the Braine: by a sodaine iump or fall: Or by vehement ryding or such like.

The recipe becomes even more unique, however, by the inclusion of a diagnostic tool, making it sound more like a medical text than a recipe book:

The best meanes to know when your heade is open is this: Bowe down the end of your thombe, and if you cannot receave the space that is betwixt the two ioyntes between your teethe, the upper ioynte beyinge towards your upper teethe and the lower ioynte to your lower teethe then your head is opened.

It took me a little while to understand this test, but after a lot of rather silly looking maneuvering (thank goodness I wasn’t writing in a café!), I think I figured out that the test goes something like this.

Photo my own.
Photo my own.

If you can open your mouth enough to fit the area between the two arrows between your teeth (I couldn’t bring myself to post a picture of me doing so), you’re fine. If not, or if it causes you pain, you have an “open head.”

The big problem here? I have no real idea of what an “open head” is (or a “closed head,” for that matter).

At first I assumed that an “open head” was caused by excessive humors, given that one of the causes is too much “moisture beying about the Braine.” But as we shall see, the treatment provided by the recipe doesn’t fit that model

As Katherine Foxhall has pointed out in a recent post on this blog, headache recipes tended to involve cookery of herbs (and indeed, the other recipes in Mrs. Corlyon’s book stay true to that form). And Samantha Sandassie has described non-herbal remedies, which ranged from the mild (plasters and ointments) to the extreme (incisions and trepanning).

“The trew cause…,” however, suggests treatment through physical manipulation of the head:

Leane your selfe upon your elboes with your heade somewhat lowe over a table, putting your face betwixt your hands, setting your thombes under the greatt skull Bone, that is behind your eares, your fingers reaching upp towardes the moulde of your heade. Gather your face in your hands leaning somewhat harde and squeasing your face and the temples of your head together, let your fyngers meete about your heade and this continue for the space of halfe an hower at a tyme, using thus to do often so long as you shall fynde occasion: you shall know when your heade is closed by your thumbe as is aforesaid.

Connecting the thumb test, which determines jaw mobility and pain, with the placement of the hands “on the large skulle Bone” behind the ear, it seems plausible that this recipe describes the stretching and massage of the temporal muscle, which begins behind the ear and fans out across the head. It is often associated with temporomandibular joint disorders (sometimes called TMJ).

Temporal muscle--lateral view, by Anatomography (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.1/jp/deed.en), via Wikimedia Commons
Temporal muscle–lateral view, by Anatomography (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.1/jp/deed.en), via Wikimedia Commons

I am really intrigued by the uniqueness of this recipe. Does its emphasis on causes, diagnoses, and nonherbal treatment reveal an evolution within the recipe form itself? Does it hint towards the split between the domestic sphere and the medical world that would come to divide the preparation of food and the preparation of medicine?

But recipe books can be such an odd mixture of structure and jumble, perhaps this recipe simply adds more to the mix.

(And if anybody figures out what an “open head” is, let me know!)

Of Quacks and Caustics

By Samantha Sandassie

Interior of Wellcome library, shelves in Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk
Interior of Wellcome library, shelves in
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images
images@wellcome.ac.uk

In 1694, surgeon William Cowper and other members of the Royal Society gathered to test a Vulnerary Powder peddled by an apothecary named John Colbatch.  The powder, Colbatch argued, was a styptic that staunched the flow of blood and allowed wounds to heal much faster.

Given the growing importance of military action in the period, with the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672-1674) and the Nine Years’ War (1689-1697), a medicine that could help out on the battlefield was invaluable.  Practitioners were moving away from cauterizing wounds with heated instruments to stop blood loss and increasingly replacing it with tourniquets in combination with powders and liquids that could staunch wounds and accelerate the healing process. William Clowes, for example, used a styptic powder whose ingredients he guarded fiercely while Richard Wiseman used successfully the so-called “Royal Stiptick Water.”

Colbatch claimed that he did numerous animal experiments that proved his powder’s efficacy.  As he stated, “I began to make Experiments upon Dogs and other Animals, Wounding them in the most desperate manner I could contrive; and in about a Hundred Experiments that I made, I had not above five that miscarried.”[1]

London surgeons felt this too good to be true and responded with everything from polite disbelief to outright scorn.  Did Colbatch, a mere apothecary, stumble upon a revolutionary new method of treating wounds?  Or was he yet another quack on the London landscape?

William Cowper. Source: wikicommons
William Cowper. Source: wikicommons

Cowper, a noted surgeon and anatomist, decided to replicate Colbatch’s experiments to test the powder himself. In a letter published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, he noted: “THE Report of Wonderful Cures wrought by Mr. Colbatch’s Styptick Pouder, so entertained the Expectations of divers Persons, that amongst others I thought my self obliged to obtain some convincing Proofs of its Operations.”[2]

To begin, Cowper experimented on two dogs, applying Colbatch’s Vulnerary Powder to their wounds. In both cases, the dogs recovered suitably and Cowper and his colleagues were excited, their hopes raised that Colbatch had, indeed, developed a powder that could help save lives.

Keeping in mind the successful animal experiments, Cowper and his colleagues made their way to London’s St. Bartholomew’s Hospital and applied the powder to two amputation stumps. First, that of a man who had his arm amputated above the elbow and second, that of a young teenage boy who had his leg amputated below the knee.

In both cases, Colbatch’s powder proved ineffective. A disappointed Cowper prepared his report on the unsuccessful experiment and sent it to the Royal Society. Cowper’s report in the Phil. Trans. hid nothing. Colbatch’s supposedly mild styptic powder put both patients in “extravagant pains” and upon removing the styptic and bandages, the amputation site on both patients looked as if they had been cauterized. The observers were duly horrified; Colbatch’s styptic, its function finally witnessed, was deemed a failure while Colbatch’s claims were dismissed as lies.[3]

Colbatch was furious and decried Cowper’s assessment. Indeed, as he wrote later, the experiment’s outcome must have been fabricated by jealous detractors.[4]

L0064675 Titlepage: Novum lumen chirurgicum Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org Titlepage: 'Novum lumen chirurgicum: OR, A New Light of Chirurgery' 1699 A collection of tracts, chirurgical and medical, viz. I. A new light of chirurgery; or a discovery of a more safe, and speedy way of curing wounds ... II. The new light of chirurgery vindicated ... III. A physico-medical essay concerning alkaly and acid ... IV. Further considerations concerning alkaly and acid ... V. A treatise of the gout ... VI. The doctrine of acids in the cure of diseases further asserted ... VII. A relation of a ... cure of a person bitten by a viper ... / John Colbatch Published: 1699. Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Titlepage: Novum lumen chirurgicum
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images
images@wellcome.ac.uk
http://wellcomeimages.org

Writing in 1699, Colbatch claimed that he had visited the patients the day after the experiment was performed and found them both well and happy with the treatment. As he wrote, “before I was capable of speaking to him [the adult male patient], he rose up in his Bed, and prayed most heartily for me, telling me he believed no man, that ever had an Arm cut off, was so well as he.”[5]

And last, to prove that the powder really was caustic, W.W. had it tested by chymists only to discover that it consisted primarily of three inexpensive and easily obtained ingredients: Dantzic vitriol of copper (a sulfate), sugar of lead for added flavour, and a bit of dragon’s blood to dye it red.[6]

The Dantzic vitriol was likely copper sulfate, a green caustic powder consisting of copper and small amounts of iron that was beaten until it turned white.  Sugar of lead or lead acetate is a toxic water soluble compound that was historically used as a sweetener and later medically as an astringent.  Dragon’s blood, a plant-based resin, was used as a wound coagulant historically but may have been added to the recipe for aesthetic purposes.

Taken together, these ingredients could not have had the almost miraculous wound-healing effect described by its inventor. Rather, as W.W. concluded “the best Way of applying of it [the Vulnerary Powder] will easily appear to be to throw it into some nasty Puddle of Water; which by its Filth, is excused from the use of Man and Beast.”[7]

Colbatch had numerous surgeons and physicians against him.  Repeated experiments and publications questioned his medical theories and cures.  Indeed, W.W. went so far as to analyze and critique almost every cure Colbatch wrote about. Yet, none of this could ruin Colbatch’s reputation once and for all because the most important  people – the patients – were either not listening, not caring, or not believing. Despite being blacklisted by many a medical practitioner, the upstart apothecary from Worcestershire died Sir John Colbatch, a wealthy, knighted physician.

Bio: Samantha Sandassie is a historian of early modern medicine whose work focuses on surgery in seventeenth-century England.  She blogs over at Panacea and can be found on Twitter @medhistorian.

[1] John Colbatch, Novem Lumen Chirurgicum (London: printed for D. Brown, 1695), “To the Reader.”

[2] William Cowper, “An Account of some EXPERIMENTS lately made on Dogs,” Philosophical Transactions 18 (1694), 42.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Colbatch, Novum Lumen, “To the Reader.”

[5] Colbatch, A Collection of Tracts (London: printed for Dan. Brown, 1699), 70-71.

[6] Ibid., 61.

[7] Ibid., 63.

Scratching “The Itch Infalable”: Johanna St. John’s Anti-Itch Cure

By Jennifer Sherman Roberts

Physical or metaphorical, itches are funny things.

"Just a little to the left" (Image credit: Vannie via Wikimedia Commons)
“Just a little to the left” (Image credit: Vannie via Wikimedia Commons)

Physical itches, as Atul Gawande points out, may well have been a response that evolved to alert us to insects and poisonous toxins. Previously thought to be triggered by the same nerve cells that control the sensation of pain, researchers have discovered that itching actually has its own special neural pathway, hence the biologically distinctive need to scratch (what Montaigne calls “one of the sweetest gratifications of nature, and as ready at hand as any”).

Metaphorical itches, too, need to be satisfied: the itch to write, the itch to see a country, the itch (as my graduate-student knitting circle phrased it) to stitch and bitch.

But then there is “the itch infalable,” a cure for which can be found in Joanna St. John’s 1680 recipe book (Wellcome Library MS4338). If itching is one of our primal biological functions, an “infalable” itch, one that could never be conquered, sounds like pure misery. Here is the text:

For the Itch infalable
Put the 3d part of an ounce of white mercury into a qrt of spring water with an ounce of salt peter & a small handful of ordinary salt let them boyle together gently an hower &a halfe and as it boyles put in more water to keep the same quantity let the party stand naked by the fire & dab in a rag wheresoever you se any itch let it dry in & wear stil the same shirt boyle the shirt in an earthn pot that may be broke & break the bottle for tis poison.

I’ll admit that I was drawn to this recipe by the poetry of the title rather than the contents of the cure, but after taking a few self-indulgent moments to admire what a fine novel title “The Itch Infallible” would make, I began wondering about the actual malady.

With lice, fleas, and newly documented scabies prevalent, itching in the seventeenth century would be a pretty common occurrence. But these were all relatively temporary conditions that could be eliminated, or at least ameliorated, by bathing and disinfecting. What then would an “infalable” itch be?

Robert Hooke, Micrographia, flea (Image credit: Wellcome Library)
Robert Hooke, Micrographia, flea (Image credit: Wellcome Library)

Could it have been responsible for the one mysterious death by “Itch” recorded in John Graunt’s 1679 book, Natural and Political Observations … upon the Bills of Mortality?

The only connection I could find between the seventeenth century and any sort of persistent itching condition is a circuitous, even backwards, one: a very modern and highly debated condition known as Morgellons Disease. Morgellons was named in 2002 by a woman researching the cause of her two-year-old son’s painful itching and lesions. She examined his skin under a microscope and disovered multiple fibers. Her search into medical history yielded an anecdote told by Sir Thomas Browne in a 1674 letter about children in the Languedoc region of France, “called the Morgellons,” who grew “harsh hairs” on their backs.

Full and nuanced discussions of the debate about Morgellons Disease can be found here and here, but to summarize, those who suffer from Morgellons have an insatiable desire to scratch in order to extract what feel like bugs burrowing into their skin. A hallmark of this condition is that sufferers find fibers in the lesions—fibers they say indicate an external source of their misery.

Many medical experts, however, believe that the mysterious fibers are simply from clothes, hair, and lint, and that the source of the patients’ suffering is parasitosis, a psychosis in which people believe they have been infested with parasites. Other experts believe that Morgellons sufferers have a very real neurological condition that causes them to feel the sensation of something crawling on them.

I am in no way suggesting that a person treated using St. John’s recipe in the seventeenth century would have suffered from Morgellons or even from Browne’s “harsh hairs,” but thinking about the possibility of a psychological connection to the very real feeling of bugs crawling over or burrowing into the skin (gah–it’s hard to write that without shivering) might help us reconstruct the lived experience of this treatment .

I could easily imagine a scenario in which a person experienced a real infestation of lice or fleas or scabies and then could not stop imagining the accompanying sensation and itching. If that were the case, a rather elaborate sort of “cleansing” in which one stand naked and exposed, wounds treat and clothing burned–such as we see in St. John’s recipe–could provide a healing for the mind.

Whether or not this treatment would be healthy for the body is another question altogether: contact with mercury is toxic. According to the National Institutes of Health, symptoms of mercury poisoning include vomiting, incontrollable shaking, and blindness.

And, in a bitter twist…itching.