Category Archives: Medical Practitioners

A Recipe for Disaster: How not to Distill Turpentine

By Tillmann Taape

When sifting through early modern alchemical recipes, I am often struck by their inherent dangers which would make modern-day health and safety officers pull their hair out. Renaissance practitioners were remarkably unfazed by temperatures high enough to melt glass and metal, and they frequently recommended heating volatile and flammable liquid in sealed glass vessels which, by their own admission, had a tendency to crack if not handled with the utmost care. Surely these exploits must have gone wrong a lot of the time, resulting in burnt fingers or a faceful of boiling alcohol?

If we look at the stereotype of the alchemist in contemporary satirical literature, it seems that accidents came with the job. In his Ship of Fools (1494), German humanist and satirist Sebastian Brant echoes themes from medieval poetry in his depiction of the alchemist: a greedy and reckless fool whose dangerous and fruitless exploits leave him scarred, financially ruined and even blind. [1] As a source of historical information, satirical genres should of course be taken with a generous pinch of salt. It is significant to note, though, that early modern people saw alchemy as a potentially dangerous thing to do, even in times long before anything like today’s health and safety standards.

More direct evidence of alchemical disasters is, unfortunately, fairly rare. I would of course be delighted to be persuaded otherwise by readers of this blog, but to me it seems that while adepts of alchemy frequently wrote down instructions which sound like they might well blow up, they were frustratingly silent on whether this actually happened. I was quite thrilled, therefore, when I finally stumbled upon a first-hand account of an alchemical disaster: exploding stills, knocked-out practitioners and all. In his 700-page tome entitled Liber de arte distillandi de compositis or Large book of distillation, first published in 1512, my favourite surgeon-apothecary Hieronymus Brunschwig (introduced here and here) includes the following cautionary tale.

Brunschwig was distilling turpentine to separate the watery fraction from the valuable oil, and when nearly all of the water had come out, he was interrupted.

 I was called away to a patient, so the oil went into the water, and when I came back, a layer of oil was sitting on top of the water. I didn’t have the sense to simply decant off the oil, so I poured the lot into a new flask and thought I’d just extract the water by distillation. But I was called away again, and in the meantime the water evaporated from the oil, and some of it condensed on the side of the flask and dripped back into the oil, which rose inside the flask with a great tumult, and fumes erupted from the flask, blowing off the alembic. [2]

 A lot to handle: picture of a still from Brunschwig’s Large book of distillation.  © Wellcome Images

A lot to handle: picture of a still from Brunschwig’s Large book of distillation.
© Wellcome Images

Things got worse when Brunschwig came back late at night and went to investigate the accident, telling his servant to bring along a light:

When the light arrived, the fumes touched it, and fire burst forth all around, and in the blink of an eye went out again, nevertheless burning off mine and my servant’s hair, clothes and eyebrows. We fell to the ground and did not know where we were, but before long we got up again and fetched a closed lantern so the same thing would not happen again, and threw ashes in the furnace to smother the fire. [2]

And this, dear readers of the Large book of distillation, is how you do NOT distill turpentine! Once the initial excitement about this truly adventurous tale had worn off, I realised that, to the historian, there was more to this anecdote than merely the satisfying confirmation that some procedures which look so precarious on paper did indeed go up in fire and smoke. In his description of this extraordinary incident, Brunschwig also reveals a number of interesting details about his everyday life and work. We get a glimpse of what it meant for an early modern practitioner to have multiple vocations. Juggling his alchemical activities with his duties as an apothecary and surgeon, it seems that Brunschwig could be called away to the aid of a patient at a moment’s notice, even at night. We also learn that he had at least one servant, and we can surmise that he did his distillations in an enclosed workshop, since a buildup of explosive fumes would be unlikely in the open air. Perhaps most importantly of all, this anecdote provides strong evidence that Brunschwig was actively performing many of the procedures he describes in his works, rather than just copying and compiling them for publication.

Anecdotes like these, then, are more than just an entertaining read and a well-earned reward for ploughing through hundreds of pages of Brunschwig’s Alsatian dialect with its erratic spelling. Descriptions of extraordinary events also grant us a glimpse into the reality of practicing alchemy, and into practitioners’ everyday life.

 

[1] On the stereotypes and changing ‘personae’ of early modern alchemists, see Tara Nummedal,  Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007, Ch. 2.

[2] Brunschwig, Hieronymus. Liber de arte distillandi de compositis […]. Strasbourg: Grüninger, 1512.

 

Dipping Your Toes in the Water: Reconsidering Renaissance England’s Attitudes Toward Bathing

Recently, the feminist newsblog Jezebel posted a short article by Dodai Stewart entitled “Tudor Fashion: Pretty, But Best Not to Think About the Stench.”  The article highlighted a portraiture exhibit of 16th and 17th century nobles In Fine Style: the Art of Tudor and Stuart Fashion, currently showing at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace and cites at length noted art historian Brian Sewell’s musings on the stenches beneath the bombast and slashed sleeves, the malodours caught in the layers of velvet and satin, and the pong of not wearing underclothes. Many Jezebel readers questioned early modern English hygienic practices and several cited familiar reeking anecdotes. One reader wondered:

 “I have always thought this about the hygiene during those years. If you don’t wash your hair after a while it smells downright rank. And what about brushing your teeth? Cleaning your pits? When did these people bathe?”

Half-length portrait of Anne of Denmark Attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, 1614 Oil on panel In this detail, we see the layers of pearls, the golden buttons on the bodice, the delicate lace cuffs, and finely wrought fabric of her gown. This detail is prominent on both the exhibit’s homepage and in the “Jezebel” article.

I hope to challenge prevailing beliefs and misconceptions about early modern bathing practices and hygienic rituals.  My intervention here is based on Mark Jenner’s nuanced approach to early modern hygienic practices and the histories of smell; while I am questioning the modern metanarrative of stench and the lack of bathing, I embrace the conflicting descriptions of bathing found in these primary sources.[1] In this first post, I tackle the concept of “bath” in the Renaissance.

Some early modern physicians lament the lost tradition of bathing so well known to the ancient Greeks and Romans: “It was most usual of old among the Romans for pleasure, but now a dayes only used for the recovery of health, and resisting of diseases” (Morel 197).[2] Nevertheless, this does not mean that all early modern English people avoided bathing and walked around stinking.

Even those who warned against the dangers of bathing, such as James Hart–who suggested not bathing more than three or four times a year in contrast with the Germans, who bath once a week, and was especially averse to bathing in cold water—still suggested washing of the hands and face (up to three times a day) as well as frequent foot washes. Hart did not proscribe outright against baths, however: “With us these bathings are not so much in request; although I deny not, they might now and then discreetly used prove profitable for the body…” (295).[3]  He then goes on to describe varieties of baths and their benefits.

The very variety of names for baths described in medical tracts demonstrate that there were a number of bathing options. People tended to bathe in cold water in spring or summer—these are usually in natural water sources such as springs, rivers, and ponds and are often referred to as “natural baths.” In the colder months, people might partake in an “artificial bath,” washing in a tub or basin of heated water. There were “stoves” (dry or moist heated baths, akin to modern saunas), “fomentations” (the ladling or sponging onto particular parts of the body heated liquids), “irrigations” (basically an early form of the shower, “a pouring of Liquor from high, like rain on any part (but chiefly the head) making it distill out of a snowted vessel” (203), and the “petty bath”: “between a Bath and Fomentation, larger than this, lesser than that” (195).[4]

Albrecht Durer, "Woman's Bath" dated 1496 Although Durer's image is dated before the closing of the public bathhouses, we see several different sorts of bathing practices occurring in this image. Beginning at the top right corner, the standing woman carries aromatic herbs. Behind her we see water being heated for the bath. The women clean themselves before entering the large, recessed communal pool at the far right. Moving clockwise, we see an elderly woman whose feet are in the public bath and she is receiving a "petty bath" by the centrally located woman in a headdress. In front of the central woman, we see an ointment jar, a sponge, and a lathering brush. To her left, we see another woman cleaning her genitals (probably with a sponge) as two younger children await their baths. A peeping Tom looks through the doors. One woman combs her hair and another scratches at her dry skin. Unlike many other Renaissance representations of women bathing (often classical scenes such as Diana and Acteon or Biblical scenes such as Susanna and the Elders or Bathsheba), this scene does not seem particularly erotic, but instead captures a realistic rendering of different women (with decidedly different body types) cleansing themselves.
Albrecht Durer, “Woman’s Bath” dated 1496
Although Durer’s image is dated before the closing of the public bathhouses, we see several different sorts of bathing practices occurring in this image. Beginning at the top right corner, the standing woman carries aromatic herbs. Behind her we see water being heated for the bath. The women clean themselves before entering the large, recessed communal pool at the far right. Moving clockwise, we see an elderly woman whose feet are in the public bath and she is receiving a “petty bath” by the centrally located woman in a headdress. In front of the central woman, we see an ointment jar, a sponge, and a lathering brush. To her left, we see another woman cleaning herself (a “fomentation”) as two younger children await their baths (probably full baths or ablutions in the nearby basins). A peeping Tom looks through the doors. One woman combs her hair and another scratches at her dry skin. Unlike many other Renaissance representations of women bathing (often classical scenes such as Diana and Acteon or Biblical scenes such as Susanna and the Elders or Bathsheba), this scene does not seem particularly erotic, but instead captures a realistic rendering of different women (with decidedly different body types) cleansing themselves.

Morel describes the variety of liquids that may be used in a fomentation:

“The SIMPLE Liquor that is wont to be prescribed for a Fomentation, as to its quality, is either hot or warm water, when we would relax in pains that come from over-much fulness; or Wine, when we would discusse and strengthen; or wine and water together where we would do both at once, or either temperately; or milk in great paines, or oyl common, or other where we would mollifie in relation to the paine, and digest as to the scope; or water and oyl, Vinegar and water, or Vinegar of Roses in hot affections, or Lee of Vine ashes in cold affections, if we should digest and dry strongly.” (191)

Even with the simple “cold bath,” we often find contradictory advice, sometimes even in the same source. William Vaughan extols the virtues of cold baths, but he limits who can partake:

“Cold and natural baths are greatly expedient for men subject to rheumes, dropsies, and gouts. Neither can I easily expresse in words how much good cold baths do bring unto them that use them: howbeit with this caveat I commend bathes, to wit, that no man distempered through Venery, Gluttony, watching, fasting, or through violent exercise, presume to enter into them.” (70-71)[5]

Yet, another later manual explains that cold baths are only good for those with naturally hot humors: “a Bath, viz. the washing of the whole body for the most part for hot and dry distempers of the whole body, seldom for cold ones, for which purpose the Stove is most convenient.”[6] The individual bather’s humoral make-up, gender, age, and current ailments could alter how often and what types of baths to use.[7]

When considering early modern attitudes toward bathing, what was prescribed or proscribed by physicians and what was actually practiced seem to vary greatly. Another Jezebel reader questioned: “But why?? Why didn’t the wealthy at least give themselves a daily sponge bath? How could they not want to feel clean and stop smelling so badly?”  But, as we have seen, there were a variety of bathing options. The Jezebel article and the readers’ comments just perpetuate modern Western attitudes toward deodorization and bathing that often create a simplistic metanarrative of stench, when the bouquets of the past are far more complex and heady than we can ever truly recover.

A forthcoming post will consider luxurious baths and sweats preferred by Renaissance ladies.


[1] See Emily Cockayne’s delightfully disgusting and well-documented Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England 1600-1770 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), especially pages 59-72 for a survey of bathing customs, teeth cleaning, wig wearing, hair washing, linen cleaning, or lack thereof for all of the above. Katherine Ashenburg’s The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History (New York: North Point Press, 2007) offers a similar, albeit less scholarly, narrative of bodily stench and lack of bathing as the norm (see pages 77-123 for her chapter on “A Passion for Clean Linen 1550-1750”).  Both of these works begin with a pre-conceived narrative: to focus on the filth, the malodorous, and the unsanitary.

[2] Morel, Pierre. The expert doctors dispensatory. The whole art of physick restored to practice. London : Printed for N. Brook, 1657.  The online “A Short History of Bathing before  1601: Washing, Baths, and Hygiene in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, with sidelights on other customs” offers a nice brief history as well as many citations from primary sources. Also see the first chapter of Kathleen M. Brown’s Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009) for a concise and fascinating study on the shift away from ablutions and toward the use of clean linens.

[3] Hart, James. Klinike, or The diet of the diseased· Divided into three bookes.:London : Printed by Iohn Beale, for Robert Allot, and are to be sold at his shop at the signe of the blacke Beare in Pauls Church-yard, 1633.

[4] Morel on fomentations (pp. 191-194) and stoves (200-201).

[5] Vaughan, William. Approved directions for health, both naturall and artificiall deriued from the best physitians as well moderne as auncient. London : Printed by T. S[nodham] for Roger Iackson, and are to be solde at his shop neere the Conduit in Fleetestreete, 1612. STC (2nd ed.) / 24615

[6] Morel, Pierre. The expert doctors dispensatory. The whole art of physick restored to practice. London : Printed for N. Brook, 1657.

[7] See for example, Zirka Z. Filipczak’s Hot Dry Men/ Cold Wet Women: The Theory of Humors in Western Europe Art 1575-1700. American Federation of the Arts, 1997, for a wonderful study of the gendered representations of men and women. I am not covering purely medicinal or therapeutic baths, such as those at Bath, but rather bathing for frequent hygienic purposes. For more on the medical spas at Bath see Amanda Herbert’s “Drinking Stinking Spa Waters in Early Modern Britain.”

Drinking Stinking Spa Waters in Early Modern Britain

The "King's Spring" in the Pump Room, Bath UK

Visitors to the Roman Baths Museum in Bath, UK spend most of their trip learning how Roman Britons swam, plunged, and sweated in thermal pools in order to maintain fitness and well-being.  But the museum tour ends at the site of a very different kind of health craze: the Pump Room, where seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women and men gulped down gallons of spa water in the hopes of curing disease.

In early modern Britain, visitors to spas such as Bath swam just like the Romans had, but they also drank the waters, filling glass and ceramic bottles at street-level pumps that purported to offer access to liquid not already paddled in by bathers.  That didn’t mean that people considered the waters to be pleasant.  Bath visitor Celia Fiennes complained in the 1670s that water from the spring was “very hot and tastes like the water that boyles eggs, has such a smell.”[1]

Believing that divine intervention was a necessary component of health and healing, patrons were also encouraged to pray while they drank spa waters.  A spa preacher named Anthony Walker recorded “short meditations and ejaculations to be used whilst the Waters are drinking” in his book on devotion at the spa.[2]  Most of Walker’s recommended spa prayers were quite short, presumably to make them easier to utter while gulping.  One read simply, “Lord, bless these Waters to us” and another modified the well-known Lord’s Prayer by asking “Give us this day our daily Bread; whatever is needful for Health or Strength, whether Food or Physick.”[3]

Despite their distinctly unpleasant smell and taste, spa waters were rarely modified, altered, or included in recipes.  Early modern medical practitioners thought that spa waters were most powerful and efficacious in their pure form, directly out of the ground.  One spa doctor, Dr. William Oliver, even complained that gauche spa visitors who added “milk [or] a variety of medicines into the waters at the pump” were “offensive” and “disturbing,” and that their ill-advised concoctions created “disagreeable sights, and ungrateful smells.”[4]

Sick or incapacitated people who found themselves unable to travel were in luck, because spa waters were available for sale in bottles.  In the late seventeenth century, Mary Parker wrote that although she didn’t “design to drink the waters,” at Bath, she would instead “take some waters hear which the dockter says will doe me as much good.”[5]  Declaring that water from a spring at Rousham had been good for her health, Anne Dormer wrote c. 1690 that “the spaw water…had been sent downe before I went from home.”[6]  And in 1716 Grisell Baillie paid for “12 botles Spa water” to be sent to her home in Scotland.[7]

But how to preserve the warmth, fizz, and mineral taste that made spa waters so unique?  Entrepreneurs at spa cities experimented with many different methods and materials for sealing the water in bottles, including corks, wax seals, and bungs.  In the 1670s Celia Fiennes reported that the waters from Tunbridge Wells were even “filled and corked in the well under the water.”  After submerging the bottles, workers would “seale down the corks which they say preserves it.”[8]

Today you can still “take the waters” at Bath.  For a few pounds, a Pump Room attendant will happily draw you a generous glass of malodorous, lukewarm water directly from Bath’s famous springs, and you can sip it while pondering the early modern history of the spa.  Prayers are optional, but might be necessary to get through the entire glass.

*****

Image courtesy of Alan Pennington [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

[1] The Journeys of Celia Fiennes, ed. Christopher Morris (London: Cresset Press, 1949), 20.

[2] Anthony Walker, Fire out of Water: Or, An Endeavour to kindle Devotion, from the Consideration of the Fountains God hath made (London, 1685), 141.

[3] Walker, Fire out of Water, 161-162.

[4] William Oliver, A Practical Essay on the Use and Abuse of Warm Bathing in Gouty Cases (Bath, 1751).

[5] Mary Parker, letters to Sarah Churchill, 1677-1689, Blenheim Papers, Add MS 61474, ff 1-5b, 10, British Library.

[6] Anne Dormer, letters to her sister Elizabeth Trumbull, 1685-1691, Add MS 72516, ff 156-243, British Library.

[7] The Household Book of Lady Grisell Baillie, 1692-1733, ed. Robert Scott-Moncrieff (Edinburgh UK: Edinburgh University Press, 1911), 107.

[8] Morris, Journeys of Celia Fiennes, 133.

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.