Tag Archives: animal husbandry

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. 

*****
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

Recipes for the Dogs in the Eighteenth Century

By Lisa Smith

John Glaisyer a Quaker anointing a dog with burning vitriol. By Charles Williams, 1806. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.
John Glaisyer a Quaker anointing a dog with burning vitriol. By Charles Williams, 1806. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

Dog-owners: ever wonder about the care of your faithful companions in times past? You’ll be glad to know that animal health recipes regularly appeared in early modern recipe books. Animal husbandry books, such as Henry Bracken’s Farriery Improved (reprinted several times from 1737 to 1792), are another useful source, as I recently discovered while on a dog blogging kick at Wonders and Marvels.* Animal health was considered to be very similar to human health: a matter of imbalanced humours, but in a coarser body. Remedies for dogs hint at the early modern understanding of dog physiology, as well as the canine ‘lived experience’ of common ailments and treatments.

Dogs were considered to have a naturally hot temperament. In the first volume of the 1789 edition, Bracken noted that dogs lack porous skins and the ability to sweat. If the weather was hot or the dog had much exercise, their “circulating fluids” would be heated by the bodily motions and come out of their mouths instead of through their skin. This had dramatic consequences, “insomuch that their very Breath appears like thick smoke”. I can’t help but wonder what manner of dogs Bracken had seen!

The canine hot temperament predisposed dogs to hot diseases. Bracken reported that dogs often contracted venereal disease through over-heating themselves carnally. Fortunately, the canine body was self-cleansing and would purge the problem through frequent urination (1789). A dog’s most useful trick…

The 1790 edition had several remedies for rabies—something seen as a form of poisoning, like venereal disease or snake-bite. Although rabies was a major concern for humans and livestock, dogs were seen as the primary source. Bracken cautioned that not all madness in dogs was caused by rabies, but might be from a worm that came out in hot weather. The white worm, found underneath the tongue, could be easily removed with a large needle.

Bracken provided remedies for other common canine complaints: mange, soft feet, bleeding, convulsions, poison, megrim [migraine], filmy eyes, ticks, lice and fleas, and sore ears (pp. 128-133). Such ailments reflect the daily life of hunting dogs. They pursued their prey through bushes, where dangers such as snakes and ticks lurked. Cuts, bleeding and wounds were common in dogs, caused when they“stake themselves by brushing through the hedges”. Greyhounds, setters and pointers tended to have paws too soft to scrabble over long distances. A simple treatment to toughen the paws entailed washing them in alum water, then an hour later, in warm beer and butter. These were working dogs; however well-treated, they had occupational hazards.

A barber-surgeon for dogs in Paris. Drawing by L. Choquet.19th century. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.
A barber-surgeon for dogs in Paris. Drawing by L. Choquet.19th century. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

Not all ailments came from work, such as convulsions, megrims or cloudy eyes. The presence of remedies for these problems suggests the emotional and financial value of dogs. Inconvenient chronic problems were tolerated and treated. During a convulsion, the intervention was a matter of common-sense: cool off the dog by dipping its snout into cold water, then give it lots to drink. Other remedies were similar to human ones. For example, the solution for megrims (identifiable by the dog staggering) was to bleed the dog at the base of the tail. In humans, bleeding at the foot would serve to draw the blood away from the head. The eye remedy revealed the care that might be taken with elderly animals. Five or six times, the carer was to dip a fine linen cloth into vitriol and spring water, squeeze it, and “gently” wash the dog’s eyes. This should be done twice a day.

The recipes suggest some of the physical effects of the treatments. The remedy for mange included washing the dog in a liquour of boiled urine and tobacco stalks, followed by a daily breakfast of fresh butter and flour of brimstone. Bracken stressed that the dog would die if it licked itself. A treatment for “deep holes” reveals how carers kept dogs from worrying at wounds before the invention of the head cone. First, the wound needed to be tented with linen dipped in fresh, warmed butter. This should be changed daily and washed with milk. In between changes, it was important to tightly bandage the tent over the wound to keep the dog from pulling it off.

Other remedies were just painful. For bruised joints, the dog needed to be muzzled, presumably to prevent biting, during the application of oil of spike and oil of swallows. When putting oil of turpentine on a fresh wound, the dog’s mouth should be secured as the oil would give a “violent smart” for a moment. Treatments for humans were also often painful, but those patients were less likely to bite.

Small wonder modern dogs dread going to the vet. They’ve probably evolved to avoid our medical care.

* For my other posts on the history of dogs, science and medicine, please see: The Art of Beagling in the Eighteenth Century , Buffon and the Beagle and The Sex Life of Dogs in the Eighteenth Century.