Category Archives: Medicine

‘All Manner of Fluxes:’ Plants and the Natalist Conquest of British Colonial America

Virginian Rock Polypody Fern. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Virginian Rock Polypody Fern. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

By Fiona O’Brien

The flows and fluxes of bodily fluids that determined an early modern woman’s embodied existence would need to be, if not controlled, understood by her. If we focus on the fluidity of the early modern reproductive body, we can begin to better understand the materia medica used to treat it; once we do so, we can begin to compare worldviews more aptly, and examine, for example, the continuities and breaks between the reproductive pharmacopeias used by Indigenous Americans and English colonists. If we accept population expansion and settlement to be a key aspect of the building of the early paternalistic American state, these materia medica used for regulating the female body become pertinent to histories of colonization, law, and politics. How was the natalist conquest of early Northeast America fueled by this piecemeal process of filling a pharmacopeia full of the familiar, and stuffing the unfamiliar into known molds? How do we investigate this process as historians, when both parties of women concerned, Indigenous and English, left few records behind?

European Polypody Fern. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
European Polypody Fern. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.


English colonists uniformly observed that Indigenous women gave birth in total isolation, did not feel pain while doing so, and recovered almost immediately: in 1634, William Wood tells English readers that for Indigenous women in New England, “a bigge bellie hinders no business, nor a childebirthe takes much time.” [1] Clearly, there was a lack of interest in recording the birthing practices of Indigenous women. But maybe we begin to get answers if we flow between sources, thus crafting an amorphous middle-ground. Early modern recipes encourage us to engage with sources collectively; those sources themselves cannot be understood in isolation, but require that the historian temporarily inhabit the phenomenal, the experiential, the habitual body.

According to Western medicine, peak health was believed to be reached when humoral balance was suited to the condition, climate, and individual. It was therefore believed that when early modern Europeans left their homelands, they risked moral, customary, and physiological degeneration; a hot climatic change would cool the man’s body and heat the woman’s.[2] The overheated female body could overmenstruate, expel fetuses, and fail to purify blood into seed or breastmilk.[3] This risked the colonial project: women were required to establish a successful colony, but their reproductivity was in danger within this humoral cosmology.

In order for a medication to be successful, it must purge: the healing patient should be vomiting, bleeding, urinating, sweating, or crying. This meant the body’s proper flow was restored, needless stoppages and loose fluids ushered back into their rightful places.[4] The humoral chilly moistness of the female body rendered the woman passive and kind, but also meant that her body was dangerously subject to disease due to its porosity and permeability.[5] Much of the female body’s organization and survival was linked to her heat, blood flow, womb, and seed, and thus to her menstrual capabilities.

But how did the English understand new ingredients that may have been visually identical to their own cures contained within their recipe books back in the metropole? ‘Flow’ provides a useful starting point. As Laurence Totelin puts it, “a woman’s life is marked by fluxes, healthy or otherwise,”[6] so historians must broadly consider the use of abortifacients or emmenagogues– agents which increase blood circulation to the pelvic area and stimulate menstruation[7]–without being clouded by our modern understanding of abortion.

Perhaps ‘flow’ was on the minds of colonists when they spotted the ubiquitous and familiar fern crawling up New England stumps and rocks. Maidenhair and polypody ferns were repeated throughout their recipe books’ entries, specifically when related to flow and heat: in 1719, Mary Kettilby recommended a mixture of herbs sweetened with “Syrup of Maiden-hair” as “a cooling drink in a Fever or Pleurisie.” Midwife Jane Sharp recommended that the polypody ferns be “bruised and boyl[ed]” then drunk, as a remedy “Against the Piles or Hemorrhoids” in postpartum women, and in 1674, Susanna Packe recommended “six ounces Polipedy” to “cleans the body of sharp humor or Mullinchollly.”

The Haudenosaunee use(d) lamb’s quarters to prevent milk flow when the child is stillborn,[8] and black snakeroot to promote it when the child is healthy.[9] Kettilby recommended “Virginia snake-weed” for use “in any malignant distemper,”[10] and in 1798 Benjamin Barton called it “a valuable medicine…sometimes called Squaw-root…from its having been used as a medicine by our Indians.”[11] “Squaw-root” points to its omnipresence in Indigenous midwifery pharmacopeia for its promotion of slow labor.[12]  Jane Staveley’s 1693 recipe book recommended “A very strengthening Medicine,” including “1 Oz. of Snake root put into a Bottle of Port Wine,” while a century later and an ocean apart, Martha Ballard recalled the inclusion of Virginia snakeroot in a water used to deliver a woman of a dead child.[13]

We can turn back to the fern here, too: maidenhair is recommended by the Haudenosaunee for excessive menstruation and abortal pains. Biologist Lenore May notes that maidenhair fronds were distilled into syrups to mitigate “female disorders” by Indigenous Americans.[14] The American Adiantum pedatum variety of maidenhair was interpreted by colonists as interchangeable with the English variety, Adiantum capillus-veneris. “Maiden Hair, or Cappellus veneris verus” was recommended by John Josselyn in 1672  “For all manner of Fluxes.” In 1653, Nicholas Culpeper remarked that fern can “purge the belly” and “cause abortion.”[15] Sharp, on cures for womb ulcers that have degenerated into fistulas, recommended a “vulnerary decoction”–used to aid in the healing of wounds– of, among other ingredients, the “roots of male fern.”

Purgation and reinstatement of proper flow are central, so the removal of a deceased fetus was also relevant. Postpartum hemorrhage, or “bloody flux” after delivery, was certainly a death sentence, to say nothing of resulting childbed fevers and infections. The Seneca practiced some form of herbal family limitation for centuries preconquest,[16] but the conflation of abortifacients used for non-abortive reproductive health purposes has led to confusion: overall, both Indigenous and English women placed emphasis on bodily flow. This emphasis in Indigenous communities is compounded by their use of sweat lodges and herb-smoking,[17] mirrored in European reproductive healthcare back to the medieval period.[18]

When we privilege “flow” as a search term, we begin to understand more about the history of colonization, and health writ large. Flow is inherent in the medium of the recipe book, too: as Wendy Wall argues, recipes represent a transitional space, the movement from “raw to cooked…nature to art, from shapeless materia to cultural product.”[19] The epistemology of the recipe book is then one predicated on flow, just as was the success of an early modern reproductive remedy.
*****
Fiona O’Brien is a second year PhD student in history at Fordham University, where she is a Loyola Distinguished Fellow and works as a writing tutor to undergraduate students. She recently completed a funded Scholarly Programs Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library, during which she presented work on early modern abortion. She presented papers focused on early modern reproductive history at several conferences over the course of her first year of the PhD, including one which analyzed the medical character of late medieval fertility and birth rituals and compared them to early modern remedy. She completed her BA and MA at the University of Toronto. During this latter degree, she was supervised by Dr. Nicholas Terpstra in the completion of her thesis, entitled “Our Groans to God: The Synching of Sensory and Emotional Experience During the Early Modern Birth Process,” and worked as a graduate promotions fellow at the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies.

Works Cited
Primary Sources

Barton, Benjamin Smith. Collections for an Essay towards a Materia Medica of the United States. Philadelphia, 1798. The National Library of Medicine. http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/2542050R

Culpeper, Nicholas. Culpeper’s Complete Herbal: Over 400 Herbs and their Uses. Edited by Diana Vowles. Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2009.

Herrick, James W., and Dean R. Snow. Iroquois Medical Botany. 1st ed. The Iroquois and Their Neighbors. Syracuse University Press, 1995.

Kettilby, Mary. A collection of above three hundred recipes in cookery, physick and surgery: for the use of all good wives, tender mothers, and careful nurses. The second edition. London: Printed for Mary Kettilby, 1719. National Library of Medicine. http://resource.nlm.nih.gov

Packe, Susanna. Cookbook of Susanna Packe [manuscript].1 674. Folger Shakespeare Library, V.a.215. https://folgerpedia.folger.edu/Recipe_books_at_the_Folger_Shakespeare_Library

Plant Atlas 2020. Botanical Society of Britain & Ireland and UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology. Biological Records Center, UK. https://plantatlas2020.org/atlas/.

PLANTS Database. Natural Resources Conservation Service. U.S. Department of Agriculture, https://plants.usda.gov/

Sharp, Jane. The midwives book, or, The whole art of midwifry discovered.: Directing childbearing women how to behave themselves in their conception, breeding, bearing, and nursing of children in six books. London: Printed for Simon Miller, at the Star at the West End of St. Pauls, 1671. Ann Arbor: Text Creation Partnership and digital collection Early English Books Online 2. https://name.umdl.umich.edu/A93039.0001.001. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections.

Wood, William. New England’s Prospect. London, 1634. In O’Brien, Jean M. “‘Divorced’ from the Land: Resistance and Survival of Indian Women in Eighteenth-Century New England”  In Native Women’s History in Eastern North America before 1900: A Guide to Research and Writing. Eds. Kugel, Rebecca and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, eds., University of Nebraska Press, 2007.

Secondary Sources

Chaplin, Joyce E. Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500 – 1676. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Cooper, Alix. Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Kugel, Rebecca and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, eds. Native Women’s History in Eastern North America before 1900: A Guide to Research and Writing. University of Nebraska Press, 2007.

Kumar, Dinesh, Ajay Kumar, and Om Prakash. “Potential Antifertility Agents from Plants: A Comprehensive Review.” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 140, no. 1 (2012): 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jep.2011.12.039.

May, Lenore Wile. “The Economic Uses and Associated Folklore of Ferns and Fern Allies.” Botanical Review 44, No. 4 (Oct.-Dec., 1978), pp. 491-528. Springer, New York Botanical Garden Press.

Mendelson, Sara Heller, and Patricia Crawford. Women in Early Modern England, 1550-1720. Clarendon Press, 1998.

Rublack, Ulinka, and Pamela Selwyn. “Fluxes: The Early Modern Body and the Emotions.” History Workshop Journal, no. 53 (2002): 1–16. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4289771.

Shoemaker, Nancy.  “The Rise or Fall of Iroquois Women.”  In Native Women’s History in Eastern North America before 1900: A Guide to Research and Writing. Eds. Kugel, Rebecca and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, eds., University of Nebraska Press, 2007.

Tannenbaum, Rebecca J. Health and Wellness in Colonial America. Health and Wellness in Daily Life. Greenwood, 2012.

Totelin, Laurence M.V. “A Woman in Flux: Fluidity in Hippocratic Gynaecology.”  Holism in Ancient Medicine and Its Reception, ed. Thumiger, Chiara. Studies in Ancient Medicine: 53. Brill, 2021.

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, and Martha Ballard. A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. 1st Vintage Books ed. Vintage Books, 1991.

Volo, James and Dorothy. Family Life in Native America. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2007.

Wall, Wendy. Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

Weisser, Olivia. Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, and Belief in Early Modern England. Yale University Press, 2015.

[1] William Wood, New England’s Prospect (London, 1634), in Jean M. O’Brien, “‘Divorced’ from the Land: Resistance and Survival of Indian Women in Eighteenth-Century New England,” Rebecca Kugel and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, eds., Native Women’s History in Eastern North America before 1900: A Guide to Research and Writing, (University of Nebraska Press, 2007): 353. Colonizing men made similar observations toward Black women in the Caribbean; for more information, see Jennifer L. Morgan, “‘Some could suckle over their shoulder’: male travelers, female bodies, and the gendering of racial ideology, 1500-1770,” The William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1997): 167-192.

[2] Alix Cooper, Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007),  44.

[3] Joyce E. Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500 – 1676, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 133-134.

[4] Ulinka Rublack and Pamela Selwyn, “Fluxes: The Early Modern Body and the Emotions,” History Workshop Journal, no. 53 (2002), 1-2.

[5] Sara Heller Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550-1720, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 20.

[6] Laurence M.V. Totelin, “A Woman in Flux: Fluidity in Hippocratic Gynaecology,” Holism in Ancient Medicine and Its Reception, ed. Chiara Thumiger, Studies in Ancient Medicine: 53. Brill (2021) 220.

[7] Dinesh Kumar, Ajay Kumar, and Om Prakash, “Potential Antifertility Agents from Plants: A Comprehensive Review,” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 140, no. 1 (2012): 1–32.

[8]James W. Herrick and Dean R. Snow, Iroquois Medical Botany, 1st ed, The Iroquois and Their Neighbors, Syracuse University Press, 1995, 142

[9]  James W. Herric, Iroquois Medical Botany, 1st ed, (Syracuse University Press, 1995), 119.

[10] Kettilby. A collection, 133-134

[11] Benjamin Smith Barton, Collections for an Essay towards a Materia Medica of the United States, (Philadelphia, 1798, The National Library of Medicine), 9.

[12] Rebecca J. Tannenbaum, Health and Wellness in Colonial America, Health and Wellness in Daily Life, (Greenwood, 2012),  60-61.

[13] Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and Martha Ballard, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812, 1st Vintage Books ed. Vintage Books, 1991, 407.

[14] Lenore Wile May, “The Economic Uses and Associated Folklore of Ferns and Fern Allies,” Botanical Review 44, No. 4 (Oct.-Dec., 1978), Springer, New York Botanical Garden Press, 508.

[15]  Nicholas Culpeper, Culpeper’s Complete Herbal: Over 400 Herbs and their Uses, edited by Diana Vowles, (Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2009), 158.

[16] Nancy Shoemaker, “The Rise or Fall of Iroquois Women,” in Native Women’s History in Eastern North America before 1900, eds. Rebecca Kugel and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 318.

[17] James and Dorothy Volo, Family Life in Native America, (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2007), 95.

[18] Monica Helen Green, The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine.

[19] Wendy Wall, Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016),  5.

Recipes for animals: husbandry and animal medicine in early modern England and Anglo-America

By Dr Leah Astbury

One group of actors has been relatively neglected in scholarship on early modern recipe books: non-human animals. And yet, farmyard animals were also members of the household-family, albeit in unequal ways. Whilst there has been some interest in the use of animal bodies and bodily products in culinary and medicinal remedies including their fat, faeces and the practice of applying alive animals to human bodies to cure, there has been little interest in animals as recipients of care, something my new research project seeks to remedy. [1] 

A great many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century recipe books contain medical and cosmetic remedies for animals.  Some of these recipes crossed the Atlantic, reaching the Anglo-American world, where they became important tools for those seeking to live a prosperous and healthful life in new territories. In the British Isles, some compilers spliced recipes for animals next to ones for humans like Magdalen Coward’s ‘For a Horse troubled with ye wind’ directly above a treatment for ‘sore Eyes’ in humans, or the Cross family recipe book that listed three recipes for horses beneath one for ‘a sore breast’ [2]. Others like a bundle of loose-leaf recipes in the papers of the Griffith family of Denbighshire in Wales, are exclusively concerned with the treatment and prevention of disease in farmyard animals [3]. Most notable of these kinds of animal-focused recipe books is a collection attributed to Eusebius Ashby (1652-1741), a Leicestershire gentleman, who kept two extensive volumes called ‘The First Book of Horses’ and ‘The Second Book of Horses’. They contained records of his veterinary practice and remedies he had collected for horses, cows, pigs, dogs, chickens and, on one occasion, a cat. He collected his knowledge from friends, cow-leeches, farriers, farmers, travellers, shepherds, rat catchers, ‘The London Carmen’ (members of the Worshipful Company of Carmen) and printed books on medicine and husbandry. Ashby also kept at least one volume of more human-focused recipes [4]. 

A page from Eusebius Ashby’s ‘The First Book of Horses’ 1705-1740, MS.993, Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Collection.
A page (95) from Eusebius Ashby’s ‘The First Book of Horses’ 1705-1740, MS.993, Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Collection.

These recipes drew on many of the same ingredients and practices used in human recipes, and were occasionally useful for both humans and animals. Indeed, some recipes for animals even drew on human bodily products. Ashby’s remedy to ‘procure a stomach’ in a horse (or increase its appetite) required a pint of ‘Human Urine (the old[e]r the bett[e]r)’ with hen dung ‘the whit[e]r the bett[e]r’ [5]. A remedy in an anonymously penned mid-eighteenth-century book of animal remedies from England, recommended drying and beating ‘mans dung’ and blowing it through a goose feather into the eyes of horses that were struggling to see [6].

Searching for animal remedies in the archives has led me to farmers’ account books and almanacs. These books have been unexplored by historians of recipe cultures. One such example is that of the Ballinger family of Arlingham, Gloucestershire in England and their farm rent account book from 1777-1784 in which William Butt recorded the purchase of cattle and rent of fields and buildings in Gloucester along with remedies like that ‘For staunching the blood of any Beast Cut or hurt and how to make a salve to heal it’ [7]. These books not only tell us about the considerable veterinary knowledge and skill required to be a husbandman (a male head of household who managed a farm), but also provide a much-needed window into the recipe cultures of a relatively non-elite social group.

Ensuring one’s animals were healthy quite obviously had high stakes for families that relied on agriculture to survive. Additionally, however, diagnosing and curing one’s ‘beasts’ was inscribed in sermons and religious texts of the period as an important aspect of masculine piety. The London clergyman John Rawlinson’s 1612 sermon Mercy to a Beast made this explicit when he noted that amongst the six obligations that husbandmen had to their animals, they ought to seek help and ‘heale’ them when they were sick [9]. In managing animal health, in these texts, husbandmen asserted their mastery over the natural world, their masculinity, devotion to God, and importantly, their Englishness. As Wendy Wall, notes, husbandry manuals of the period sought to ‘English the soil’ [10].  

These ideas, practices and literal remedies were taken with colonists when they travelled to North America and sought to establish new communities, the success of which also depended on the health and wellbeing of farmyard animals. Husbandry manuals were some of the first books imported to Virginia including Barnaby Googe’s 1614 The Whole Art and Trade of Husbandry and the 1616 English translation of Charles Estienne’s Maison Rustique [11]. Virginia DeJohn Anderson has noted how farmyard animals were key, if unknowing participants, as the ‘advance guard’ of settler colonialism transforming the environment irrevocably [12]. 

Richard Surflet, Maison Rustique, or, the Countrey Farme (London: 1616). Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Richard Surflet, Maison Rustique, or, the Countrey Farme (London: 1616). Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Collection.

The few recipe books that were penned by settlers from the British Isles in America, or taken from home for use there, show that the culture of inscribing remedies for animal health alongside human health persisted. Peter Dicks (1696-1760), living in rural Pennsylvania, recorded in his recipe book ‘A Cure for Cattle that has murr[a]in’, an infectious disease characterised by fever and general malaise, opposite a remedy for the presumably human ‘Piles’ [13]. The Saffin-Ellis family who spent years in America before moving back to England, included a ‘receipt for the mange in a Hors’ in their book of cures [14]. The 1712 New York and Boston editions of The Husband-man’s Guide contain a chapter on remedying illness in horses, sheep and cows alongside receipts for humans and advice on account keeping [15]. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur, a Frenchman who owned a farm in Chester, New York, described in the mid-eighteenth century how a good farmer should be knowledgeable about animal medicine and would apply the ‘recipes he possesses’ [16]. The place of recipe collecting for one’s animals did not just persist in Anglo-American colonies but became a key part of economic and social success. 

Recipes for animals in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century receipt and account books point to the complex entanglement of the bodies and health of human and non-human members of the family. Collecting and applying recipes for farmyard animals redounded to husbandmen’s piety, their nationality, masculinity, and, one might argue, the colonial project as a whole. 

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Dr Leah Astbury is a Lecturer in Health History at the University of Bristol. Her first book, Making Babies in Early Modern England, will be published by Cambridge University Press in November 2025 and is about pregnancy, childbirth and after birth care. She is currently working on a project on animal medicine and husbandry in the early modern British Isles and Anglo-American colonies.

NOTES

[1] From this site for example see:  R.A. Kashanipour, Canine cures or our best friend…,; Lisa Smith, ‘The puppy water and other early modern canine recipes’, and Robert Ralley and Lauren Kassell, ‘Pigeon slippers’. An exception to this is Catherine Flood’s piece on this blog ‘My Charming Ancestor: Lost Spells and Sick Cattle’. Louise Hill Curth has also been interested in animal medicine but mostly using printed medical texts see: The Cure of Brute Beasts: A Social and Cultural Study of Veterinary Medicine in Early Modern England, Leiden, 2009 and ‘A plaine and easie waie to remedie a horse’: equine medicine in early modern England, Leiden, 2013. 

[2] Magdalen Coward, ‘Booke of Receipts’, MS 88, unfoliated, Huntington Library, California and Cross family, ‘Receipt book 1724’, f. MS. 1986 002, unfoliated, University of California, Los Angeles, California.  

[3] Griffith family of Garn, ‘Veterinary recipes 1730-1767’, ED3/2, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, Wales. 

[4] Eusebius Ashby, ‘The First Book of Horses’, MS 993 and ‘The Second Book of Horses’, MS 994, Wellcome Library, London. Ashby’s more human volume is titled ‘The Second Book’ and is held at the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland. There is presumably a ‘The First Book [of humans]’ but I have not been able to locate it so far.

[5] Ashby, MS 993, p. 74. 

[6] Anonymous, MS.4124, unfoliated, Wellcome Library, London.  

[7] Ballinger family, ‘Farm rent account and account book, 1777-1784’, D356/1, p. 36, Gloucestershire Heritage Hub, Gloucester. 

[8] John Rawlinson, Mercy to a Beast A Sermon preached at Saint Maries Spittle in London on Tuesday in Easter-weeke (Oxford: 1612), 23-32. 

[9] Wendy Wall, ‘Renaissance National Husbandry: Gervase Markham and the Publication of England’, Sixteenth Century Journal 27, 3 (1996): 659-976. 

[10] Hillary M. Nunn, Recipes on the Move in Early Modern England and British North America: Domestic Medicine, Mobility, and Manuscript Culture (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2025), p.114.   

[11] Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of empire: how domestic animals transformed early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 243.  

[12] Peter Dicks, ‘Home remedies 1715-1718’, unfoliated, Delaware County Historical Society, Media, Pennsylvania. 

[13] Saffin-Ellis Miscellany, Ms. Codex 230 Saffin-Ellis miscellany

[14] The Husband-man’s guide in four parts (New York and Boston: 1712). 

[15] Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Sketches of eighteenth century America: More “Letters from an American farmer” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1925), p. 40

Sound Recipes: Music as Medicine in Early Modern Goa

By Amitabh Vikram Dwivedi

"The Mount of the Good Shepherd," c. 1650, A.58-1949, Victoria and Albert Museum. Produced by Goan ivory artists, this statue combines Portuguese-Christian and Goan art styles and iconography. Image courtesy of the V&A.
“The Mount of the Good Shepherd,” c. 1650, A.58-1949, Victoria and Albert Museum. Produced by Goan ivory artists, this statue combines Portuguese-Christian and Goan art styles and iconography. Image courtesy of the V&A.

In early modern South Asia, sound worked as a therapeutic agent that crossed textual, ritual, and oceanic worlds. European observers in the Jesuit entrepôt of Goa — one of the most prominent hubs of Catholic missionary activity in India — and household compilers across the Atlantic world translated, adopted, or rejected these sonic practices. This contribution situates “sound recipes” within the logic of the pharmacopeia, according to which a rāga (a melodic framework in Indian classical music associated with specific moods and times) or mantra (a sacred verbal formula believed to have spiritual or healing power) can be dosed, timed, and combined with other substances, such as herbal infusions, perfumed oils, or mineral pastes, much like a drug.[1] Musicological studies on early modern South Asia, roughly spanning the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, have linked rāga, time, and rasa (the aesthetic mood or emotional essence evoked in performance) to somatic and emotional states.[2] Building on this insight, this contribution triangulates close readings of three sources: first, Sanskrit medical and musical sources in which mantra, nāda (primordial or resonant sound), and rāga act as therapeutic agents, (e.g., Bhaiṣajya Ratnāvalī and Saṅgīta Parijāta); second, missionary letters and reports from Goa that frame healing as a site of translation; and third, early modern European recipe books in which prayer and chant appear beside simples.

Goa as a contact zone

On the western Indian coast, sixteenth-century Portuguese physicians such as Garcia da Orta and Cristóvão da Costa catalogued Indian materia medica while operating inside a Catholic imperial world.[3] Their dialogues show how Portuguese medicine negotiated local drugs, practices, and authority. Jesuit letters and mission histories from the same context present healing as a privileged site of cultural brokerage. Missionaries learned and sometimes used local therapeutics, staging cures that blended prayer, relics, and vernacular ideas of efficacy.[4] While the Jesuit archive highlights Christian ritual sound, it also attends to Indian bodily techniques and substances, suggesting that mantra-like repetition and Latin prayer were mutually legible within a shared recipe logic. In Jesuit infirmaries and domestic chapels, healing often unfolded as a multisensory practice: prayers were murmured over decoctions, oils were stirred in rhythm with chants, and Latin invocations blended with Sanskrit syllables. The result was a working grammar of healing in which utterance and dose reinforced each other. The ladle, mortar, and pestle set the rhythm, and the voice kept time. What emerged was not a confused hybrid but a practical recipe culture that judged efficacy by repeatable acts, including speech.

Jesuit correspondence from the Estado da Índia — the Portuguese imperial territories in the Indian Ocean, with Goa as their administrative and missionary center — consistently treated healing as a tool of persuasion. Medical care, herbal knowledge, and ritual sound became the means through which missionaries sought to demonstrate the efficacy of Christian devotion and attract converts. The letters sketch a choreography of roles: a lay brother to measure and infuse, a scholar to recite orisons over the sick, and a converted nurse to translate for patients and procure medical ingredients at the market. Prayer did not cancel the dose; it stabilized it. In practice, for example while cooking, repeated Pater Nosters or litanies functioned like a timer, dictating the duration of the simmer, the cooling, and the interval between spoonfuls.[5]

Garcia da Orta’s Colloquies catalogued Indian drugs and the social settings in which they were obtained. Merchants and physicians visited the houses of the sick, kitchen workers were consulted, and patients received decoctions that tasted of cinnamon and clove as much as of missionary hospitality. Orta weighed local testimony, sometimes admitting to a plant’s healing power while omitting information about the ritual words that accompanied its use. His description of Goa’s medical life reads less like a study than a domestic pharmacy staffed by servants and informants who knew that recipes often traveled with words, prayers, and spells attached to them.[6] Cristóvão da Costa’s printed Compendium extended Orta’s list of drugs and diagrams. Its path from Goa’s kitchens to Europe’s presses shows how a cure that began with a whispered invocation could be reduced to a chemical extract or powdered preparation — stripped of its ritual and sonic dimensions —     even as prayer in Goa’s Jesuit college continued to time the stirring of medicines in the infirmary.[7]

Music as medicine

The Jesuits also worked with an acoustic theory of cure. Relics, blessings, and the sign of the cross functioned as spoken technologies. In Goa, missionaries recognized that Indian patients already understood the logic of a spoken remedy. Atharvavedic and Ayurvedic pairings of plant and verse were not exotic outliers but familiar structures with different words. And so, in the mission kitchen, Latin did not replace mantra in the act of dosing so much as stand alongside it . A Konkani-speaking patient might not understand the words or meanings of Latin words but could recognize the pattern: an uttered formula, a breath, and the spoon. Jesuit chroniclers marked successful cures with the language of grace, while local interlocutors could interpret the same cure as the right plant, rightly cooked, with a voice that prepared the body to receive it.[8]

These spaces of missionary healing also served as spaces of translation. At the cauldron, a Jesuit brother preparing remedies learned to name plants as his patients did, adopting local terms and pronunciations so that recipes and treatments could circulate across languages and communities.. He learned timings shaped by coastal winds, monsoon humidity, and fasting calendars. He learned that certain decoctions were best taken at dawn, when the body’s heat and the day’s rāga aligned. Even if the mission did not adopt Indian musicology, it absorbed its clock. The schedule of matins and vespers met local dosing of mornings and evenings. In the Goan kitchen, college bells doubled as timers. The clang that called the community to prayer also told the cook when to lift the pot.[9]

European household  medicine and recipe culture had already prepared missionaries to accept words as curative adjuncts. Early modern recipe books placed psalms and charms beside simples without discomfort. A charm to staunch blood might sit next to a syrup for coughs. The value of these entries lay not in abstract theory but in the report that they had proven efficacy. When Jesuits in Goa encountered Indian sound medicine, they carried this idea with them. It allowed them to absorb counts of recitation or the tying of a thread while a verse was spoken. In the Goan mission kitchen, such actions could be recoded as Christian piety without altering the rhythm the patient’s body was used to feeling.[10] Yet the kitchen could also be erased. When cures moved from the voice-filled room to printed missionary accounts or natural histories, the words were often flattened. Efficacy was attributed to the drug alone, and the context of sound was treated as superstition or allowed to fade.
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Amitabh Vikram Dwivedi is an Associate Professor in the School of Languages and Literature at Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University, India. He earned his Ph.D. in English at Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2012. At SMVDU, he teaches courses on applied linguistics and stylistics. His recent work has focused on folk songs, folks tales, and Hindi proverbs.

NOTES

[1] Schofield, K. B. (2023). Music and musicians in late Mughal India. Cambridge University Press. https://assets.cambridge.org/97813165/17857/excerpt/9781316517857_excerpt.pdf;  Jairazbhoy, N. A. (1971). The rags of North Indian music: Their structure and evolution. Lok Virsa Publishing House. https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.26725

[2] Rowell, L. (1992). Music and musical thought in early India. University of Chicago Press; Kaufmann, W. (1968). The ragas of North India. Indiana University Press. Open Library

[3] Orta, G. de. (1563/1913). Colloquies on the simples and drugs of India (C. Markham, Trans.). Internet Archive. https://archive.org; da Costa, C. (1578/1582). Tractado de las drogas y medicinas de las Indias orientales. Internet Archive. https://archive.org

[4] Županov, I. G. (1999). Disputed mission: Jesuit experiments and Brahmanical knowledge in seventeenth-century India. Oxford University Press; Wicki, J. (Ed.). (1948–1988). Documenta Indica (Vols. 1–18). Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu. HathiTrust Digital Library

[5] Lea T. Olsan, “Charms and Prayers in Medieval Medical Theory and Practice,” Social History of Medicine 16, no. 3 (2003): 343–366.

[6] Garcia da Orta, Colloquies on the Simples & Drugs of India (London: Henry Sotheran & Co., 1913), ix–xii, 65–72.

[7] Cristóbal Acosta, Tractado de las drogas y medicinas de las Indias Orientales (Burgos: Martín de Victoria, 1578), 1–10, 145–150.

[8] Ines G. Županov, Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1–20.

[9] Josef Wicki, Documenta Indica, Vol. III, 1553–1557 (Rome: Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu, 1954), 45–47, 112–118.

[10] Guy L. Beck, Sonic Theology: Hinduism and Sacred Sound (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 1–12, 95–108.

A Cure for Cardiacle: Making and Tasting a Medieval Remedy for Heart Ache

By Caleb Prus

Grief often feels as physical as it does emotional—like a weight on the chest, a flutter of the heart, or a tightening in the throat. The distinction between these physical and emotional symptoms is largely a product of modern medicine; in the premodern world, those boundaries were far blurrier. In The Canterbury Tales (c.1390), Chaucer’s Physician tells a story so tragic that the Host cries out, “I almost have caught a cardiacle”—a heart pain brought on by pity and sorrow—and begs for a drink of ale before he collapses from grief. But what exactly was a “cardiacle,” and how might a medieval ale have helped? As both a medical student and a scholar of medieval medicine, I set out to answer these questions, by recreating a centuries-old recipe—and tasting for myself how people in the Middle Ages tried to ease heartache.  

The Death of Fébus (d. 1391). Chronicles of Froissart, London, BL, Harley 4379 (c.1470-1475), f. 126. Public Domain.

The cardiacle feared by Chaucer’s Host was a broad diagnosis for heart-related distress. It referred to chest pain, palpitations, and fainting spells—what we might now call angina, arrhythmia, syncope, or even a heart attack. But for medieval people, living centuries before the discovery of circulation, the heart wasn’t a pump. It was the seat of feeling, emotion, and spirit. A sudden wave of grief, or an excess of melancholy (black bile) could literally make the heart sick. This is why the Host panics after the Physician’s Tale: he fears that sorrow itself might give him a cardiacle. And while this diagnosis is rooted in humoral theory, this link between emotion and cardiac dysfunction is supported by modern medicine. Today, we recognize conditions like Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy, commonly known as “broken heart syndrome,” in which acute emotional stress can lead to temporary heart failure.

Given its literary and medical prominence, I was intrigued when I came across a remedy for cardiacle in a Middle English medical manuscript. The recipe was simple, direct, and surprisingly easy to recreate:

For the cardiacle

Take gallynggale, gyngeuer and licoris, with fynel; seth and make to poudre, and drynke with stale ale.

The remedy is, essentially, a spiced ale—something Chaucer would have readily recognized. In The Miller’s Tale, he writes that the barber-surgeon Absolon woos his beloved with “spiced ale,” and in the Tale of Sir Thopas, Chaucer lists licorice, zedoary, cloves, and nutmeg as flavorings “to putte in ale / wheither it be moyste or stale.” This recipe for cardiacle is a variation on this familiar tradition, blending licorice, ginger, galangal, and fennel into a warming, aromatic drink.

Ingredients used to recreate the remedy for cardiacle.

The ingredients were surprisingly easy to source. The instruction to “seeth” the herbs likely referred not to boiling but to drying and dehydrating them, preparing them to be ground into powder with a mortar and pestle. At my local spice shop, I found dried fennel seeds, ginger pieces, and licorice root, all ready for grinding. For the galangal, which I bought fresh-frozen from an Asian grocery store, I dehydrated slices at 250°F for several hours until they were brittle enough to crush. 

Finding the right ale proved more challenging. Medieval ale was quite different from today’s beer: unhopped, malty, and slightly sweet, often brewed with a mix of herbs or bittering agents in a style now referred to as gruit. It was also regularly consumed while it was still fermenting or allowed to settle into “stale” ale, as the recipe directs. Without the means to brew my own gruit, I settled on Samual Smith’s Nut Brown Ale, a low-hop British ale with a mellow maltiness and smooth body—about as close to a medieval ale as I could get off the shelf.

On brew day, I laid out my ingredients and began grinding them by hand with a mortar and pestle. Following the proportions implied by the recipe, I used equal parts of each herb, about half a teaspoon per ingredient, mixed into one cup of gently warmed ale. The resulting drink smelled strongly of fennel and licorice. Its taste was intense: sweet, earthy, and medicinal, with a lingering licorice bitterness on the tongue. Hoping to make the potion more palatable, I reduced the quantities to just a pinch of each spice for the second batch. Even then, the licorice dominated, its sweetness overwhelming the other flavors. The drink was also course and gritty. Since the recipe offered no instruction to strain it, I left the powder in the cup, which resulted in heavy sediment that clung to the teeth. 

Warmed ale after the addition of ground spices.

In the end, the potion was challenging to drink—a sensory shock to a modern palate more accustomed to hoppy beers than to bitter, spiced tonics. Its flavor was unmistakably medicinal and sweet, dominated by the taste of fennel and licorice. Yet I suspect the experience would have been quite different for a medieval drinker. The unhopped, malty base of a traditional ale would likely have complemented the sharper notes of the spices. And while modern drinkers tend to associate black licorice with cough syrup or candy, that connotation may not have existed in the medieval period. To medieval tastes, this kind of spiced ale may have been not only palatable but genuinely comforting.  

As The Canterbury Tales continues, the pilgrims stop at an alehouse, allowing the Host to finally get the draught of ale he so desperately craves. The Physician and his potions are nowhere to be found in this scene—but perhaps that’s the point. The physical and emotional dimensions of cardiacle were deeply intertwined, and so too was its cure: a warming drink, shared among fellow travelers, to soothe the heart in both body and spirit. In the end, Chaucer’s Host wasn’t simply asking for ale; he was reaching for spice, for solace, and for the ritual comfort of drinking in good company.


Caleb Prus is a 4th-year MD candidate at the University of Rochester School of Medicine. He holds a MSt in English (650-1550) from the University of Oxford and a BA in English Literature and Chemistry from the University of Rochester. His Master’s dissertation studied the use of Middle English bloodletting texts by John Tyryngham, a fifteenth-century Londoner. He has presented his research at the Leeds International Medieval Congress, the Kalamazoo International Congress on Medieval Studies, the American Association for the History of Medicine Annual Meeting, and the Corner Society for the History of Medicine.