Category Archives: Knowledge Transmission

Distilling Vernacular Medicine

By Tillmann Taape

As Katherine Allen has pointed out in her post, distillation was regarded as a powerful way of separating and purifying earthly matter, and was central to the alchemical pursuit of the philosophers’ stone. And, yes, the odd gallon of whisky was also a much-welcomed product. This view of distillation is reflected in the textual processes that charaterise the Western alchemical tradition. Beginning with twelfth-century translations of Arabic texts into Latin, scholars constantly excerpted, compiled, translated, and digested all available knowledge, identified what was useful, and then compounded it to suit different tastes and purposes.

This double importance of distillation – techical and textual – is highlighted in the first distillation handbook ever printed, the Liber de arte distillandi de simplicibus, also known as the Small book of distillation, which was published in 1500 by the Alsatian surgeon and apothecary Hieronymus Brunschwig (c.1450–1512). While this book contains numerous recipes for distilled waters, it can also be seen as representing in itself a recipe for acquiring and presenting medical knowledge. Despite its Latin title, it was written in German, and quickly became a best seller, no doubt cashing in on the growing popularity of distilled medicinal waters. To teach his readers the art of distilling, Brunschwig drew on his wide reading (over three thousand books, according to him) and practical experience to concoct ingredients from different traditions of knowledge.

Brunschwig was well-versed in the alchemical literature, which at the time mainly circulated in manuscript form. Publishing his book in print, Brunschwig introduces a broad public to an  alchemical understanding of matter, and how it can be transformed and purified. In fact, the process of distillation itself is defined in these terms, as “nothing but to separate the subtle from the gross and the gross from the subtle, […] to make the physical more spiritual, [so that it] may more easily penetrate the human body with its secret powers and virtues” (SB 1509, fol. 6r.). This extraction of the useful from the superfluous is also an important process in vernacular medical literature, and Brunschwig extracts not only from alchemical sources, but also boils down the essence of the learned medical tradition.

With reference to ancient textual authorities such as Galen and Dioscorides, he briefly explains the workings of the human body in terms of the four humours which govern an individual’s ‘complexion’, with diseases representing a deviation from this humoural balance. This can be readjusted by administering medicines distilled from plants, or even animals, with the appropriate qualities.[1] This precarious balancing act means that a sound knowledge of medical ingredients was essential, which is why a large portion of the Small book  is taken up by a herbal section. It offers some of the best botanical woodcuts produced at the time, paired with encyclopaedic entries listing each plant’s appearance, medicinal qualities, and the distillation process by which these might best be extracted.

The third major source for Brunschwig’s distillation project, artisanry, has closer links with alchemy than one might at first suspect: as historian Pamela Smith has shown, early modern craftsmen subscribed to an alchemical worldview, and were confident that their personal observation and direct physical engagement with natural material was a reliable source of knowledge.[2] Brunschwig shared this view: based on his own experience with distillation procedures, he is able to anticipate pitfalls (e.g. don’t let a heated glass vessel cool down too quickly, or it will crack!), and to dispense practical advice on the quality and proper manipulation of different stills and vessels. This technical know-how boiled down into an easy-to-follow series of short chapters, which really starts from scratch. There is even a life-sized picture of a mould which should be used to shape the curved bricks needed for building a round furnace, and set in its centre, was a poem summarising the key points to remember.

Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Res 2 M.med. 35, f. 11v-12r. (http://www.bsb-muenchen.de)

A mould for shaping bricks from Brunschwig’s distillation manual. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Res 2 M.med. 35, f. 11v-12r. (http://www.bsb-muenchen.de)

Brunschwig’s manual, then, not only contains valuable recipes for harnessing nature’s healing powers through distillation, it also represents in itself a recipe for the production of a best-selling and highly usable book: he compounds his knowledge of texts with his own experience and observation. He digests, extracts, and purifies his intellectual and technical ingredients, and where other compilers often produce turgid mixtures of jumbled-up recipes, Brunschwig manages to distill clear and useful knowledge from learned medical, alchemical and artisanal traditions. His example was followed by many early modern compilers of medical printed books, and the Small book itself went through an intriguing series of transformations in its various editions, including an English translation which appeared as early as 1527. But we certainly shouldn’t think that the story of textual digestion and excerption stops there: as Katherine Allen discussed, and as I have seen in the Small book, readers were assiduously annotating their copies. They highlighted what was most useful for them, added to the information, and cross-referenced entries, thus achieving another level of distilling textual knowledge.

[1.] For more on humoral theory and the logic behind materia medica, see Lisa Smith’s post on “Medicinal Compounds, Efficacious in Every Case” and Alun Withey’s post on “‘Weird’ Remedies and the Problem of ‘Folklore‘”.

[2.] P. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Idem., “In a Sixteenth-Century Goldsmith’s workshop”, in L. Roberts, S. Schaffer and P. Dear (eds.), The Mindful Hand (Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2007), pp. 33–57; Idem., “What is a Secret? Secrets and Craft Knowledge in Early Modern Europe”, in E. Leong and A. Rankin (eds.) Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, 1500–1800 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 47–66.

Exploring CPP 10a214: The Angel (not) in the Recipe

By Rebecca Laroche with Hillary Nunn

Last month, Hillary Nunn (20/02/21013) introduced our series of entries that are considering an exceptional manuscript owned by one Anne Layfielde and dated 1640 housed at the Medical Historical Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia.  Our interest in the manuscript stems largely from the remarkable number of attributions the section compiled by one “Cal: Downing” records.  Over 100 of the 134 recipes written in that hand have some version of a “probatum per” or “proven by” attached to them.  The first recipe, “To make an excellent Salue called Flos vnguentorum,” along with 41 others, is attributed to a woman named Elizabeth Downing.

Recipes for “Flos Unguentorum” or “The Flower of Ointments” are ubiquitous in various versions throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The version in The College of Physicians manuscript begins “Take Rosen & Perosen of each / halfe a pound.”  The reader is thereafter instructed to heat together several gums and powders with “virgin wax,” which are cooled “till [the mixture] be bloode warme.”[1] The page following these directions is dedicated completely to “the vertues of this salue,” which include, among many others, the curing of “old wounds,” head aches, and hemorrhoids.

Now I mentioned briefly back in October (18/10/2012) that the Elizabeth Downing who is the source of so many recipes in this manuscript may have some connection to the “Mistress Downing” named thirteen times throughout the print collection Natura Exenterata: Or Nature Unbowelled (1655), and a couple of the print recipes do have suggestive overlapping ingredients and wording with recipes from the Layfielde collection. Natura Exenterata, which is clearly connected to the House of Arundel through its front matter, also includes a recipe for “Flos Vnguentorum” (but one not attributed to Mistress Downing) in which the virtues and directions are reversed, but the directions are almost exactly the same, starting with like ingredients, including an allusion to blood temperature, and ending with the directions to put the salve into rolls for the later use of the practitioner.

The Arundel example, however, includes one detail in its list of virtues not found in Layfielde manuscript: “it cometh of Jesu Christi by an Angell to a house of Religion at the red hill in Almayn [Germany], which wrought there many marvails.”[2] A third manuscript, an anonymous one found at Bryn Mawr dated 1649 (before the print text) also includes the recipe for the flower of ointments, one which almost exactly corresponds to the recipe in Natura Exenterata and includes the origin myth. The Bryn Mawr manuscript also includes several recipes from the Countess of Arundel, Anne Dacre Howard (1557–1630), mother-in-law to Aletheia Talbot Howard (d. 1654), whose portrait graces the front matter of Natura Exenterata.[3]  The inclusion of Mistress Downing in the Natura and the naming of the Countess of Arundel in the Bryn Mawr manuscript, along with the overlap in the Flos Unguentorum recipes, suggest a triangle of relations, at least in the generation before the decade of compilation around the 1640s.

The correspondences in the recipes may imply a fourth outside source, but if this is the case, somewhere in transmission the origin myth was omitted from the list of virtues in the Downing example. What, if anything, can the mythic origin of this recipe, its inclusion or exclusion, tell us about a recipe’s more immediate historical source, particularly of collections compiled in years of religious conflict? The Countesses of Arundel were known Catholics, and the inclusion of divine intercessors in manuscripts and books of their circle would not have been unexpected.  All signs (including his mother’s name, Elizabeth), however, point to the “Cal: Downing” of the Layfielde manuscript being Calybute Downing (1606–44), Protestant minister (as also possibly Anne Layfielde’s husband) and Parliamentarian, whose doctrine would be less likely to include such intercessors. Was this omission then made for expediency’s sake or was it indicative of the beliefs of the compilers?

This is the second in a series of monthly posts on this topic.


[1] College of Physicians Manuscript 10a214, page 1.

[2] Natura Exenterata, 332. Another Elizabethan print source which, like the Downing recipe includes the directions first then lists the virtues, recounts the origin in Germany, but not the angel, Thomas Lupton, A thousand notable things of sundry sortes (London, 1579), 104.

[3] Bryn Mawr College Special Collections MS 19, fol. 5.

Tobacco Smoke Enemas in Eighteenth-Century Domestic Medicine

By Katherine Allen

Over the holiday I was working on a transcription of an eighteenth-century recipe book and came across an initially humorous recipe for treating ‘the winde & Collick’ (Wellcome, WMS 3500) which goes as follows:

And so is tobacco given in A pipe [when] it is well Lighted the small end to be oyled and put up into ye fundament and some body put the great end into their Mouth and blow the smoake up into the body this never fails to give ease to the winde collick you may put A small Glister pipe into the body and put the small end of the pipe Tobacco in the End of ye Glister pipe this way will Convey the Smoak into ye body very well. (fol. 87r.)

This surprising description of getting a companion’s assistance in administering the remedy has inspired me to write this post on the history of the familiar phrase ‘to blow smoke up one’s arse [ass]’ and the possible use of tobacco glisters in eighteenth-century domestic medicine.

Tobacco Plant. Image Credit: http://www.spamula.net/blog/i41/non3.jpg

Tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) is a type of herb in the night shade family Solanaceae. It was smoked by indigenous peoples in the Americas as far back as 1000BC, but gained popularity in Europe and in global markets through trade in the sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century, tobacco was a popular luxury good in England and was increasingly consumed more for pleasure than medicinal treatment.

But how was tobacco used as medicine in the early modern era? Discussing the humoral and astrological qualities of tobacco, Nicholas Culpeper stated in an eighteenth-century version of his herbal that it was a hot and dry herb under the dominion of Mars. Tobacco was useful as an infusion for vomits, rheumatic pain, and piles. As a distilled oil, it was used for aching teeth however, ‘the distilled oil is of a poisonous nature; a drop of it taken inwardly will destroy a cat’. Culpeper also praised tobacco as an expectorant, a digestive aid, and a pesticide for vermin and for preventing plague.[1]

Those who are familiar with recipe collections will have surely come across at least one recipe using tobacco, and the most common recipe seems to have been a tobacco ointment. The Tyrrell Family collection has one such recipe which called for bruised tobacco leaved infused in red wine and then boiled in hog grease along with tobacco juice and beeswax.[2] Tobacco has astringent qualities and acts as a coagulant, and would have been an effective ingredient in salves for treating wounds. Another recipe stated that the tobacco salve ‘is an excellent Mundifier [cleanser] and healer of old sores, and Ulcers, if the sores be first washed with a little good brandy, which ought to be done, till the sores look fresh, which it will do in 3 or 4 dayes if this course be taken.’[3]

Wellcome, WMS 7822, fol. 11r. Image Credit: Wellcome Library

But, when and how did tobacco smoke enemas come into use and how did this treatment come to be in a household book of remedies? The phrase ‘to blow smoke up one’s arse’ means to get a rise or reaction out of someone, sometimes by giving them insincere compliments for attention. This phrase originates from the practice of using smoke enemas to resuscitate near-drowned victims via stimulation and it was first practiced by indigenous groups in North America.[4]

During the eighteenth century, tobacco smoke enemas were used by humane societies across Europe, including the Royal Humane Society in London, to resuscitate victims.[5] Culpeper included the tobacco enema under treatment advice for the inflammation of the intestines induced by colic or hernia and suggested that it ‘is of singular efficacy in obstinate stoppages of the bowels, for destroying those small worms called ascarids [roundworms], and for the recovery of persons apparently drowned.’[6] Physician Richard Mead was a proponent of the tobacco glister, using it to treat iatrogenic drowning caused by immersion therapy for hydrophobia and mania, and later Thomas Sydenham wrote a treatise on its use in bowel obstructions.[7] The use of this treatment declined in the early nineteenth century when it was affirmed that the nicotine found in tobacco can stop blood circulation if there is too much in the body, as in the case of an enema.[8] By the mid-nineteenth century the enemas were not used by the medical faculty.

Tobacco Pipe Enema circa 1773. Image Credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tobacco_smoke_enema.png

There is no author associated with the tobacco glister recipe found in MS 3500, but it is likely that this information was communicated to the compiler by a physician. This particular collection is dated 1688-1727 and was owned by a Mrs. Meade (and others), but it does not appear that she was related to Dr. Richard Mead. Several of the recipes are however directly attributed to Dr. Richard Lower for treating the young Nathaniel Meade, one of which is a purge dated the 1st of December, 1688.  There is also one recipe attributed to Dr. Needham on the page before the tobacco glister recipe.

Considering that tobacco enemas were only in vogue from the mid-eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century, it is unusual to find this medical advice in a domestic collection, let alone one dated from the early eighteenth century. As it is improbable that an eighteenth-century household would have had its own tobacco pipe for administering a glister for bowel complaints, I suspect that this recipe is an example of a physician’s remedies being copied into a domestic collection. More importantly, this is an example of how recipe books were continually evolving and being updated alongside innovations in the medical faculty. What started as a chuckle over an amusing recipe has led me to explore the history of this peculiar remedy from its use by the medical faculty to its indigenous origins; giving a whole new meaning for me to the phrase ‘blow smoke up one’s ass’.

 


[1] Nicholas Culpeper, Culpeper’s Family Physician; or Medical Herbal Enlarged. Vol. 2 (London, 1782). p. 134.

[2] Wellcome, WMS 7822. Anon [Tyrrell], ‘Collection of Medical and Cookery Receipts, 17thC-18thC’, fol. 11r.

[3] Wellcome, WMS 1796. Anon, ‘Collection of Cookery and Medical Receipts, c. 1685-c.1725’, fol. 64r.

[4] Raymond Hurt et al., The History of Cardiothoracic Surgery from Early Times (London: Parthenon, 1996). p. 120.

[5] Lawrence Ghislaine, ‘Tools of the Trade, Tobacco Smoke Enemas’ The Lancet vol. 359 issue. 9315 (April 2002): 1442.

[6] Culpeper, p. 281.

[7] Thomas Sydenham, ‘Schedula Monitoria, or an Essay on the Rise of a New Fever’ in Benjamin Rush, The works of Thomas Sydenham, M.D., on acute and chronic diseases: with their histories and modes of cure (Philadelphia: B & T Kite, 1809). p. 383.

[8] Ghislaine, 1442.

The Origins of Haggis: A Burns Day Post

Chris Hilton

Recent historical work casts doubt on the provenance of Scotland’s national dish, as reported on the BBC website on Monday 3rd August 2009. Historian Catherine Brown has located a reference to haggis in Gervase Markham’s 1615 work The English Hus-Wife, which predates Burns’ celebration of the dish by more than a century and a half (and is, of course, held in the Wellcome Library).

The hunt is on, then, for more seventeenth-century references to haggis, to prove or disprove its Scots origins. The Wellcome Library’s launch of a digitisation programme makes available the contents of seventy recipe books from this period, indexed down to individual recipes and available for remote study via the internet. Already one haggis recipe is visible to the public, in an early seventeenth-century volume held as MS.635. In a faded but perfectly legible hand, the author instructs one in the art of making a haggis:

Take a calves chaldron [entrails] and parboyle it; when it is cold mince it fine with a pound of beefe suet & penny loafe grated, some Rosemary, tyme, Winter Savory & Penny royall of all a small handful, a little cloves, mace, nutmeg, & Cinamon, a quarter of a pound of currants, a little suger, a little salt, a little Rosewater all these mixt together well with 6 yolkes of Eggs boyle it in a sheepes paunch and so boyle it.

Does this help to settle the argument? Not quite: the snag is that we do not know who wrote MS.635 or where. This sounds like sitting on the fence, or maybe on Hadrian’s Wall: but all we can do is invite readers in to the Library or onto our website, to view the manuscript, try to work out its origins, and join in the argument.

This post was originally published on the wonderful Wellcome Library blog in 2009. Thank you to Chris Hilton who has very kindly allowed us to edit (slightly) and post this for Robert Burns Day!