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Animals, Apothecaries, Early Modern, Manuscripts, Medical Practitioners, Posts

Canine Cures or Our Best Friend…

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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. 

******

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.

Animals, Beauty, Early Modern, Ingredients, Medicine, Posts, Remedies

The Puppy Water and Other Early Modern Canine Recipes

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By Lisa Smith

At first I thought it was a joke when I read a recipe for “The Puppy Water” in a recipe collection compiled by one Mary Doggett in 1682. “Take one Young fatt puppy and put him into a flatt Still Quartered Gutts and all ye Skin upon him”, then distill it along with buttermilk, white wine, pared lemons, herbs, camphire, venus turpentine, red rosewater, fasting spittle, and eighteen pippins.

Mary Doggett, Book of Receipts, British Library MS Add 27466, f. 24r.

Although Mary Doggett’s recipe does not specify purpose, puppy water was a facial treatment – as immortalized by Jonathan Swift in his poem, “The Lady’s Dressing Room” (1732):

There Night-gloves made of Tripsy’s Hide,
Bequeath’d by Tripsy when she dy’d,
With Puppy Water, Beauty’s Help
Distill’d from Tripsy‘s darling Whelp.

Swift also, however, refers to another canine usage: gloves made from dog’s hide. As noted in Nicholas Culpeper’s Pharmacopoeia Londinensis (1718), “little puppy dogs” (and various other animals, such as hedge-hogs, snails, foxes, moles, frogs, or earthworms) “may be made beneficial to your sick bodies”. Robert James’s entry for “Canis” in his Medicinal Dictionary (1743-5) explained that Europeans “generally abstain from Dogs Flesh, till Necessity… obliges them to use it.” But use it they did: the flesh, fat, skin and excrement could all be incorporated into medicines recommended even by renowned medical practitioners.

These remedies ranged from the foul: Culpeper’s Oleum Catellorum (Oil of Whelps) “to bath the Limbs and Muscles that have been weakened by wounds or bruises” or George Bate’s gargle for mouth ulcers and thrush that included a white dog turd (Pharmacopoeia Bateana, 1706). To the cruel: Philip Woodman suggested cutting a live puppy lengthwise through the middle and applying it hot to the head to treat a frenzy (Medicus Novissimus, 1712). To the comforting: for iliac passion (intestinal obstruction), Thomas Sydenham instructed that a live puppy should be laid to the patient’s naked belly for two or three days (Praxis Medica, 1707).

Etched image of a dog nursing three pups.
Nursing dog. Etching by C. Lewis after E. H. Landseer. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

James’ dictionary entry explained the rationale for these treatments. For example, keeping a warm puppy next to one’s colicky belly or gouty leg provided “kindly and cherishing Heat”, but it also worked sympathetically by transferring the disease into the animal instead.[1] Having a dog lick one’s wounds and ulcers could cure them more quickly. The fat of the dog was thought to be better externally than any other animal fat, owing to its penetrating quality, and the drippings could be eaten to treat lung problems or epilepsy. Turned into gloves, the skin of the dog would reflect summer sun; as a piece of leather, it could protect gouty or arthritic legs from cold. Dog dung, being hot and acrid, might treat internal bleeding or toothache.

James did not mention “The Puppy Water” itself. However, for that we might look to the ancient Greeks whom he did discuss. According to Hippocrates, “the Flesh of Dogs is of a heating, drying, and corroborating Nature… whereas that of whelps is of a moistening, lubricating Quality.” The other ingredients in the recipe point to a similar use as the puppy: pippins were moistening and good against inflammation; fumitory and agrimony treated diseases of Saturn (such as old age) and were strengthening and cleansing; plantain firmed the sinews and helped skin problems. Just the thing for a face wash!

[1] The evidence for this is dubious. James recounted the case of a patient in 1742 being salivated (by mercury). When a visitor arrived, the patient put aside his basin filled with his saliva, which his dog proceeded to drink. Within ten hours, the dog suffered from convulsions and died.

This post first appeared at the now-defunct, but much missed, Wonders and Marvels blog in May 2012.

Animals, Magic, Medieval

The Medieval Invisible Man

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By Laura Mitchell

As I promised in my last post, today I want to touch on a magical recipe with ties to some interesting sources. One of the manuscripts I focused on for my dissertation research is Oxford, Bodleian Library Ashmole MS 1435. This is an anonymous manuscript from the fifteenth century that contains mostly academic medical texts and is a large collection of over 180 magical and non-magical recipes in English and Latin in no discernible order. Understandably, in a collection that large the kinds of recipes vary considerably: there are recipes for cooking, metallurgy, divinatory experiments, texts of the virtues… and four experiments for invisibility (pages 7, 12, and 25).

The desire to become invisible seems to be a common theme for the pre-modern magician. Experiments promising this outcome survive in similar recipe collections in London, Wellcome Historical Medical Library MS 517 (a fifteenth-century Dutch collection); Kassel, Murhardsche und Landesbibliothek Codex Medicus 4˚10; the Greek Magical Papyri from Greco-Roman Egypt; Munich, Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek, Clm 849, the German necromantic handbook edited by Richard Kieckhefer in Forbidden Rites; and it is frequently seen in later medieval ritual magic.1 And of course this desire has extended to the modern day with Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility!

Of the four recipes for invisibility in Ashmole 1435 one in particular caught my eye. This is the third one in the manuscript and it is the most complex, bearing a strong resemblance to a necromantic operation for invisibility in Clm 849 and a spell from the Greek Magical Papyri. The Ashmole recipe runs as follows:

Si vis esse inuisibile: accipe vnum canem mortuum et sepilles eum et plantes super eum fabus et vnam in ore tuo et sine dubio eris inuisibile

(If you wish to be invisible: take a dead dog and bury it and plant a bean plant over it and place one in your mouth and without a doubt you will be invisible.)

V0043440 Bean plant (Phaseolus species): flowering and fruiting stem
Bean plant (Phaseolus species): flowering and fruiting stem with three beans. Coloured pen and ink drawing by F. V. Ghini, c.1700. [Credit: Wellcome Library, London]
The Clm 849 operation for invisibility instructs the operator kill a black cat that was born in March.  He cuts out the cat’s eyes and places heliotrope seeds in its eyes and mouth; then he buries the cat while reciting conjurations. Once the plant has sprouted, the practitioner takes each sprouted bean, putting them in his mouth one by one while gazing into a mirror until he turns invisible.2 The similarities are quite remarkable and I would argue that there has been some appropriation of the necromantic ritual here.

The biggest distinction between the two is the lack of conjurations in the Ashmole operation and the distinction between killing a cat and finding a conveniently dead dog. Both of these operations in turn share a resemblance to a short spell from the Greek Magical Papyri from the third or fourth century, in a book titled The Diadem of Moses. In this operation the magician places the dog’s head plant under the tongue while lying down and recites certain magical words.3

It’s hard to say what exactly is going on here. How related are these three rituals? It’s clear that there is some sort of connection between the rituals in Clm 849 and Ashmole 1435, albeit indirectly, but what of their relationship to the spell from The Diadem of Moses? Was there a corruption of the text from the dog’s head plant to the dog/cat of the later operations? Did the Diadem of Moses ritual find itself translated and transported over the centuries across Europe, ending up in one instance in the necromantic manual of an anonymous German scribe, and in another instance in the equally anonymous book of an English scribe? If so (and I don’t see why not), this is an example of a magical recipe surviving and being passed on for over 1200 years.

1. Richard Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer’s Manual of the Fifteenth Century (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998). ↩

2. Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites, 60-61; 240. ↩

3. Richard L. Phillips, In Pursuit of Invisibility: Ritual Texts from Late Roman Egypt (Durham, North Carolina: American Society of Papyrologists, 2009), 110-111. ↩

Animals, Early Modern, Family and Household, Ingredients, Medicine, Plants and Herbs, Posts, Remedies

Hydrophobia and madness: eighteenth-century recipes against Rabies

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Recently, I came across an eighteenth-century ‘cure’ for rabies in a Dutch medical handbook, consisting of onion boiled with salt and honey.[1] As I had recently been vaccinated against rabies for a trip to Asia and had been lectured by the nurse about the dangers of rabies, this recipe made me curious.

A mad dog on the run in a London street: citizens attack it as it approaches a woman who has fallen over. Coloured etching by T.L. Busby, 1826. Wellcome Library, London.
A mad dog on the run in a London street: citizens attack it as it approaches a woman who has fallen over. Coloured etching by T.L. Busby, 1826. Wellcome Library, London.

A quick search for eighteenth-century Dutch medical literature on rabies gave a surprising result: in the first half of the eighteenth century only two pamphlets and some general listings in medical and pharmaceutical handbooks occurred. However, around 1790 there seems to have been a sudden spike in the number of medical publications on the occurrence and treatment of rabies. It is difficult, if not impossible to tell what the reasons were. There may have been some kind of outbreak of the disease in the Netherlands at the time, or maybe the number of cases rose steeply in this period because of the increased popularity of pet dogs, as a recent German study has suggested.[2]

Whatever the reasons, a wide array of cures against rabies was suggested. Apart from the onion-honey-salt concoction, I encountered, amongst others, the following:

– A brew of ten different roots and herbs, boiled in three pitchers of old beer or vinegar. The wound should also be washed with it.[3]

– Drawing the poison from the wounds with ‘fresh earth, sand, mud or tobacco,’ and feeding the patient beer vinegar mixed with butter, combined with a strict diet and blood-letting.[4] This author was so kind as to inform his readers about remedies that did not work too, such as May bugs in honey, mercurial rubbings, and wood beverages.

– Three egg yolks, fried with three half-egg shells full of ‘tree oil,’ taken for two days and applied to the wound for nine.[5]

'Recept tegen de Dolligheyd van Menschen en Beesten,' (recipe against madness in humans and animals) anonymous pamplet, 1723
‘Recept tegen de Dolligheyd van Menschen en Beesten,’ (recipe against madness in humans and animals) anonymous pamplet, 1723

Sadly, none of this would have done anything to cure rabies. Until Louis Pasteur developed a vaccine in 1885, a rabies infection was invariably fatal. People probably believed the remedies listed here worked because not every ‘mad dog’ is a rabid dog, and many of the reports of ‘cured’ cases were made within days of someone being bitten. As it can take up to a year for rabies to manifest itself, depending on the location and the severity of the bite, people undoubtedly died of ‘hydrophobia’ months after a bite wound would have healed, thus missing the link between the incident and the disease.

The best way to deal with rabies in the 1790s was to avoid it, as also shown in a 1798 advert. It appeared in a spectatorial journal and commended a set of six prints, to be put up in chirurgeon’s shops and taverns. The prints advised the general public on the avoidance of and ways to deal with dangers. The first of these tables dealt with “the bite of a Mad [rabid] Dog, and shows the picture of a picture of a Mad Dog. Furthermore, it deals with poisons, the swallowing of harmful bodies, strikes by lightening, and the suffocation of children.”[6]

[1] M. Noel Chomel, Huishoudelyk woordboek, Vervattende vele middelen om zyn goed te vermeerderen, en zyne gezondheid te behouden, Met verscheiden wisse en beproefde middelen (vertaling Jan Lodewyk Schuer en A.H. Westerhof). S. Luchtmans/H. Uytwerf, Leiden/Amsterdam 1743, 30.

[2] Steinbrecher, A, “Zur Kulturgeschichte der Hundehaltung in der Vormoderne: Eine (Re)Lektüre von Tollwut-Traktaten,” Schweizer Archiv für Tierheilkunde, vol. 152 (2010),no. 1: 31-37

[3] Recept tegen de Dolligheyd van Menschen en Beesten, anonymous pamplet, 1723

[4] J.D.M. Cleve, “Verhandeling over den Dollen-Honds beet.” Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen. A. van der Kroe en J. Yntema, Amsterdam 1792, 102-109.

[5] A.J.A. Looff, “Middel, alhoewel eenvoudig in zyn voorkomen, egter proefondervindelyk zeer vermogend eevonden, tegen de geduchte gevolgen van den Dollen Honds-beet, of de watervrees, op nieuw bekend gemaakt.” Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen. A. van der Kroe en J. Yntema, Amsterdam 1790, 371-3.

[6] Advertisement for “Zestal van Tafelen, behelzende eene algemeene opgave der middelen tot redding in schielyke gevaaren, enz. Door Dr. A.C. Struve. Te Amsterdam, by A.B. Saakes, 1798.” in: Vaderlandsche Letteroefeningen. A. van der Kroe en J. Yntema en zoon, Amsterdam 1798, 583.