Category Archives: Series: Johanna St John

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.

Remedies, Surgery and Domestic Medicine

Editors’ note: This post provides a sneak peek of Seth LeJacq’s fascinating article, “The Bounds of Domestic Healing: Medical Recipes, Storytelling and Surgery in Early Modern England“, which recently appeared in the Social History of Medicine. You should go read the whole article! An early version of the article was awarded the 2010 Roy Porter Student Essay Prize by the Society for the Social History of Medicine. The essay prize is a wonderful opportunity for undergraduate and postgraduate students to submit unpublished, original essays. Congratulations, Seth!

By Seth LeJacq

I began poking around in the manuscript recipe collections in the New York Public Library’s Whitney Cookery Collection during my summer research a few years ago, and I was struck by the wide array of ailments different recipes addressed. I was particularly surprised to find many remedies for surgical complaints, and that some recipes also included stories about the efficacy of remedies claiming that they had succeeded when sufferers were “given over” by doctors or had allowed them to avoid invasive surgical interventions.

Dropsy - St John
Johanna St John’s recipe book, Wellcome MS 4338, fol. 49r. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

Another [for the dropsy]. Eat an handfull of Raisins and a crust of bread or a sea Bisquit in the morning, and drink not till noon, and then eat a peice of bread when you drink this cured Mrs Hearing who was to have been tapp’d.

These simple instructions in the Johanna St John collection, for instance, were said to have “cured” dropsy sufferer “Mrs Hearing, who was to have been tapp’d.” That is, by using this recipe she was saved from having to undergo surgery to drain fluid from her body. I discussed similar sorts of recipes claiming to help avoid breast surgeries in an earlier post. These sorts of recipes show that domestic healers thought they might need to be able to deal with serious surgical complaints. They also show that they were interested in finding alternatives to unpleasant and dangerous surgical therapies.

Even when recipes did not explicitly bill themselves as medicinal alternatives to surgery, collectors may have seen them as implicitly offering such alternatives. Medicinal remedies for bladder stones and cataracts, for instance, would allow sufferers to avoid being cut.

One question I’d still like to answer is whether people may have seen other sorts of recipes in this way. Take childbirth-related recipes. There are many recipes to help with delivery in stillbirth, for instance, such as this recipe, also from the Johanna St. John collection.

Johanna St John’s recipe book, Wellcome MS 4338, fol. 211r. Source: Wellcome Library.
Johanna St John’s recipe book, Wellcome MS 4338, fol. 211r. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

To bring forth a Dead Child or Afterberth.

mugwort root or herbe wch is then most in strength boyle it in water tender stamp it fine put to it a little wheat chissel boyle it a little againe put it in a linnin Bag Lay it to the Bottom of her Belly as hott as she can suffer it.

Again, this is a fairly simple recipe that helps in a difficult and dangerous situation. What is interesting about recipes like this one is that surgeons claimed that they should be the ones to perform these deliveries. Lay collectors gathered a lot of medical knowledge belonging to the realm of midwives or surgeons. These recipes may be able to teach us more about the relationship between patients and these medical practitioners.

In fact, many recipes are intended to help people address medical complaints that surgeons treated. Early modern surgeons healed injuries and ailments on the exterior of the body, and they worked on keeping the body in good working order and aesthetically pleasing. Thus they could do a wide range of work, from setting broken bones, bleeding, and lancing boils, to cleaning teeth and beautifying the face. All of this was surgical work, and much of it is also found in various recipes circulating among collectors who didn’t work as medical practitioners. We even find recipes for serious surgical problems — fistulas or gangrene, for instance. Recipes of these sorts are common enough that it’s clear that many collectors wanted to (or felt they might need to) deal with problems that surgeons claimed as their own.

Surgeons were well aware that patients found some of their therapies unpleasant and consequently sought out alternatives, including domestic medicine. They sometimes even admitted that this impulse, and the practices of domestic healers, might have something to teach surgeons.

Equestrian portrait of Charles I and title page of the second edition of the Surgeon’s Mate (1639). Woodall’s is the center portrait at the bottom. Source: Wellcome Images.
Equestrian portrait of Charles I and title page of the second edition of The Surgeon’s Mate (1639). Woodall’s is the center portrait at the bottom. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

Take the arguments for surgical reform in the published works of John Woodall (1570-1643). Woodall was an influential member of the Barber-Surgeons’ Company, the first Surgeon General of the East India Company, and an important surgical author. His Surgions Mate (first edition 1617) went into multiple editions over a half-century. It was the foundational English text on sea surgery, but also had a broad influence among readers of all sorts.

A recipe from Woodall. (See the paper for similar examples). Lady Ayscough collection, Wellcome MS 1026, fol. 46r. Source: Wellcome Library.
A recipe from Woodall. (See the paper for similar examples). Lady Ayscough collection, Wellcome MS 1026, fol. 46r. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

Woodall remains best known for his writings on scurvy (he was an early citrus booster!), but his works also present a critique of surgical education and practice. He argued that surgeons were sometimes too violent in cutting. He held that aggressive interventions did not allow patients to benefit from the healing power of nature. Woodall used the example of gentle female domestic healers as a model of practice that would allow nature to help. He wasn’t against cutting by any means — he was known for developing a tool to drill into the skull (just see the image below), and was an expert in amputation.

Surgical tools, including Woodall’s trefine. From the 1655 edition of The Surgeon’s Mate. Source: Wellcome Library.
Surgical tools, including Woodall’s trefine. From the 1655 edition of The Surgeon’s Mate. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

He was, however, receptive to criticisms of surgical practice, and very sensitive to patients’ fears of surgery and desires for alternative therapies. His work provides clear evidence that those fears and desires, which led people to collect the sorts of recipes we looked at above, had an influence on surgeons.

It’s easy to sympathise with patients’ fears of being cut; surgery was painful and potentially quite dangerous. Patients were clearly not content to simply suffer or submit to operations. Recipe books show that collectors wanted options when it came to serious surgical problems.

Just who is this Johanna St. John?!?

By Elaine Leong

This week I have the honour of giving a talk at Lydiard House and Park near Swindon.  Until the beginning of the 20th century, Lydiard House and Park was the country estate of the St. John family.  Regular readers of this blog are, of course, already familiar with Johanna St. John and her late-seventeenth century recipe book.

Wellcome Western MS 4338. Image from Wellcome Library, London.

In the fall of 2012, Lisa Smith’s students at the University of Saskatchewan spent part of their semester transcribing Johanna’s book.  You might recall reading some of their blog posts in December. Over the last year or so, Lydiard House and Park’s archivist, Sophie Cummings, and her team of volunteers have also been hard at work transcribing Johanna’s book and in bringing Johanna’s medical activities to a modern audience through a play staged by a youth theatre group, family education events and evening talks.  At this point, you might well ask, who is this Johanna St. John and why does she merit so much attention?

Anon., Portrait of Lady Johanna St. John circa 1690, Image from Lydiard House and Park.

Johanna St. John, or Lady J as she is nicknamed by the Lydiard group, was the eldest daughter Oliver St. John, a prominent Parliamentarian and supporter of Oliver Cromwell. Johanna (1631-1705) married her distant cousin Sir Walter St. John, MP for Wootton Bassett and Wiltshire.  Their grandson, Henry the first Viscount Bolingbroke was a well-known politician, diplomatist and author.  During their marriage, Sir Walter and Lady Johanna divided their time between their mansion in Battersea and their country estate, Lydiard House near Swindon.  Remarkably, an extensive set of correspondence between Johanna and her Lydiard steward Thomas Hardyman has survived. These letters indicate that Lydiard Park, far from being simply a summer home for the St. Johns, supplied them with all sorts of foodstuffs from fruits, herbs and flowers grown in the gardens to cheeses, butter and poultry from the nearby farms.

Johanna’s letters are a fascinating read and provide a rare glimpse into the housewifely concerns of a late seventeenth-century gentlewoman. They paint a picture of an active household manager who expressed great interest and concern in various foodstuffs and homemade products (from butter to cheese to beer to distilled medicines) produced at Lydiard.  Not one to shy away from micromanagement, Johanna instructed Hardyman when to start fattening the turkeys and geese for Christmas feasts, berated him when he dared to send up unripe cheeses and gave him precise barley malt to hogshead ratios for the brewing of beer.  Most interestingly, the correspondence also reveals that Johanna was in the habit of sending recipes gathered from her London acquaintances to be made up at Lydiard Park where she relied on a team of expert distillers and herb gatherers. Johanna’s detailed instructions, including specific directions to contact local experts for particular ingredients, give a clear picture of how one gentlewoman can ‘make’ medicines via ‘remote control’.

An image of a woman distilling taking from the frontispiece of J.S., ‘The accomplished ladies rich closet of rarities’ (London, 1691).

When taken together, Johanna’s recipe book and letters reveal both complex networks of contemporary lay medical knowledge amongst family members and paints a vivid picture of medical activities in an early modern English country house. Our collective transcription of Johanna’s book renders the work electronically searchable and (very soon) widely available.  We hope that it goes one step towards analyzing and acknowledging the complex set of activities taken on by early modern housewives and, in Johanna’s case, her large crew of ‘helpers’.

Some “Fishy” Remedies for Madness and Melancholy

By Pamela Deagle

Johanna St. John’s recipe book contains many interesting and unusual recipes on the treatment of madness, melancholy, and fits of the mother early modern. These recipes offer clues to the domestic understanding of mental illness and its causes. There were very few similarities between the recipes in St. John’s book, suggesting that although there were only a few early modern categories of psychological disturbances, there was wide variation within each category. This has led me to discover some “fishy” recipes for the treatment of madness and melancholy that are certainly questionable as to their success. The domestic treatment of mental illnesses is an interesting point of study for seventeenth-century England, because the care of the mentally ill was left to their family and friends. Asylums before 1700 were relatively small, rare, and expensive (MacDonald, 262, 266).

So what did people think caused mental illness? The herb borage, used for fevers and to comfort the spirits, was the only repeated ingredient used in two recipes for melancholy. As well, the recipe “For vapors euen to Madnes” calls for powder of holly leaves, used for the treatment of fevers. Fevers and psychological afflictions were thought to be linked. In a recipe “For Melancholly and madnes”, the main ingredient is ivy or ale-hoof, used for spleen ailments and melancholy. This suggests melancholy and spleen problems were connected. According to early modern medicine, physical ailments in one area of the body might affect an entirely different area (Wear, 134-135).

A Tench. Engraving by R. Carpenter after C. Hardy. Credit: Wellcome Library.

One particularly strange remedy is literally fishy. “A medecine For Madnesse”, if taken in time, requires a fish (specifically the tench) to be cut open, rubbed with mithridate and tied around the neck, “guts and all”. Although more of a mystery as to what exactly the benefits of such a treatment would be, there is some suggestion of a belief that inanimate objects would allow the transfer of the illness away from the person and into the object. As well, the tench, also known as the “physician fish” supposedly had magical properties in its slime (OED).

This wide variety in the domestic treatments for madness and melancholy provides insight into how early modern people understood and treated mental illnesses. As well, these recipes indicate that individuals suffering from mental maladies were regularly treated at home. Today we would most certainly not treat depression by tying a fish, guts and all, around the neck, but our own understanding of mental illnesses is far from complete. Perhaps hundreds of years from now our methods may seem just as “fishy” as those used in the early modern period.

Works Cited
“Culpeper’s Complete Herbal Alphabetical Index.” Complete Herbal. http://www.complete-herbal.com/culpepper/completeherbalindex.htm#b, 2010.

Lindemann, Mary. Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: University Press, 1999.

MacDonald, Michael. “Women and Madness in Tudor and Stuart England.” Social Research 53, 2 (1986): 261-281.

“Tench, n1.” The Oxford English Dictionary. 3rd ed. 2002.

Wear, Andrew. Knowledge & Practice in English Medicine, 1550-1680. Cambridge: University Press, 2000.