Tag Archives: animals

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

Canine Cures or Our Best Friend…

By Marc Bruck

To paraphrase the old adage: dogs are humanity’s best friend. Loving, loyal and protective, they are often considered members of the family. They are symbols of wealth and power, love and affection. Recent accounts in the popular press, such as the Guardian’s piece from July “Hot dogs: What soaring puppy thefts tell us about Britain today”, have shown that they are also valuable accessories to modern life. However, in Early Modern Europe, the qualities of the canine were much more varied than that of a cherished companion. In particular, until the end of the Eighteenth Century, folk healers identified dogs as treasure troves for medical remedies and treatments. While an affront to many modern sensibilities, dogs were not simply pets, but were themselves useful sources of materia medica that cured a variety of ailments.  This essay puts the focus on an aspect of dogs that is ubiquitous with the ownership of the animal, dog feces, which was known in medicinal terms as album graecum

The use of  dog feces in medicine can be traced back to ancient Egypt and classical Greece and Rome. Known by a variety of medicalized names in the premodern period, including album graecum, tercus canis, cynocoprus,zibethum caninum, and flores melampi, the medical feces comes from dogs that are fed limited diets of bones alone.  Album graecum, therefore, is white dung produced by a dog (preferably a white one) that is free of color and obnoxious smells (Fig. 1).

Figure 1 – Album graecum

At the chemical level, album graecum contained significant amounts of calcium phosphate, mineral that figures prominently in many modern drugs and remedies.  Today, for human consumption, the mineral is largely extracted from the mineral Apatite, while in veterinary practice it is derived from animal calcium and bone meal.

In early modern European recipe books, album graecum was used as a dried and friable element in medicines for everyday ailments.  For instance,  one can find the white powder incorporated in the records of the seventeenth century German doctors von Mynsicht (1588-1638) and Ettmüller (1644-1683).  In the eighteenth century, album graecum appeared in pharmacopoeias across Europe. The Cyclopaedia of Chambers of 1728 designates its usage “with honey, to clean and deterge, chiefly in Inflammations of the Throat; and that principally outwardly, as a Plaister.”

The medicinal uses of the materia medica of dogs figures prominently in a fascinating mid-eighteenth century medical manuscript written by a healer called Sébastien-François de Blanchart.  Penned largely in French, de Blanchart’s work is known as the “Vieux recueil de remèdes” and commonly called “Blanchart’s Remedies.” It is currently housed in the National Archives of Luxembourg, where it has been scanned for digital access for the public.  While little is known of Blanchart, his remedies featured everyday materials of unsanctioned healers of Early Modern France.  In particular, dog feces, or album graecum as it was known in Latin, figured prominently in remedies for moderate internal inflammation. 

The seventeenth century healer de Blanchart considered album graecum essential to the treatment of common maladies affecting the throat, though not for those where the inflammation obstructs breathing and swallowing (Fig. 2). His records show that white powder could be administered directly to the uvula by means of a feather or combined into a serum. In one recipe, he records its combination with a mixture of everyday items, including beer and honey. 

Figure 2 – Sébastien-François de Blanchart, Vieux recueil de remèdes, fs 200. National Archives of Luxembourg.

De Brouchart’s recipe for throat ailments calls for the following: 

1 pint of beer of the strongest and oldest available

6 pieces of Album graecum

2 spoons of mel rosatum (honey)

The preparation involved cooking the ingredients over a gentle fire until the liquid reduced to half its volume. The liquid was to be strained and sieved, before being administered to the patient either consumed by the spoonful or by rinsing the mouth.  

Materials derived from dogs figure prominently in numerous recipes from de Brouchart and other early modern European medical texts, which we will pick up in a subsequent post called “Puppy Love.” For more on the use of dogs in remedies, please see: Lisa Smith’s “The Puppy Water and Other Early Modern Canine Recipes” from October 23, 2018. 

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I am most grateful to Mme Zeien curator and librarian at the Archives nationales for making the digitised document available; it was originally classified as item 423 of the 15th department of the historic section of the Institut grand-ducal in Luxembourg.