Tag Archives: Johanna St. John

Exploring CPP 10a214: Lady Honywood, Continued; or On E. Layfield’s Gout

By Rebecca Laroche with Hillary Nunn

In my entry in April, I introduced a medical practitioner, Lady Honywood, who had recipes attributed to her in The College of Physicians of Philadelphia manuscript owned by Anne Layfield.  Lady Honywood’s reputation as a devout nonconformist and medical practitioner have been recorded in the diary of Ralph Josselin. Her recipes appearing in another recipe book not only give us more evidence of her practice, but also reveal something new about the Layfield manuscript.

Three recipes attributed to Lady Honywood appear in the 1680 manuscript compiled by Johanna St. John, which has been discussed at length in a previous post by Elaine Leong.  These recipes are scattered throughout the St. John manuscript and are treatments for three very different conditions.  The initial Honywood attribution, which appears early on in the manuscript, is an “admirable thing for a cancer.”  This was the second time that Johanna St. John had recorded a recipe for cancer on that page – the first being attributed to a Lady Temple:

 
Honywood recipe in St John copy
Wellcome MS 4338, digital image 0010.

As the two recipes that frame these are for the sore breast, the implicit location of this canker is on the breast as well.

The next lies amongst a series of cough medicines, “For the Cough of the Lungs, / which has cured thos that have died one gene / ration after another”:

Wellcome MS 4338 digital Image 0068
Wellcome MS 4338, digital image 0068

The recipe record, while short, gives testimony not only to the recipes efficacy, but also to Lady Honywood’s acumen.  She, after all, has cured a disease that had been plaguing a family for decades.  The final recipe bears full transcription because so brief and carries a tinge of magical thinking (see posts by Laura Mitchell on this site),  “Lady Honywood to prevent miscarying,” which reads simply “A dryed Toad & hang it about the wast.”  [1]

In isolation, these three Honywood recipes are of a piece with many we have seen:  two medical practitioners exchange their knowledge, and one, under different topics, has organized that knowledge along with others she has gleaned.  When we put these recipes next to the Layfield manuscript, however, we gain new insight into how and why the Layfield recipes were collected.

The Honywood recipes in the Layfield manuscript are not the same as those that are found in the St. John recipes.  As a reminder, the first two of the three Honywood recipes collected by E. Layfield were for the gout, the second for the King’s evil.  While E. Layfield and his wife Anne may have practiced medicine among their acquaintances, this document begins to reveal itself as a more local document, as gout seems to be one of its central concerns.  While only four recipes address gout in the Downing half of the manuscript, and then often amongst a list of other ailments, seven recipes are listed specifically for gout in the smaller Layfield section, and one of these (within three pages of the Honywood recipes), “An excellent Receite for the Goute, to giue ease,” ends with this attribution and testimony: “Master Rob. Wingfeld gaue it me with / much adoe, & great intreaty, at  / Sir Rich. Wingfelds at Easton / Its singular good, I haue tryed it.”[2]

Who the Wingfelds were and where they lived are subjects for further research and another post, but what we can tell from this entry and the collection of Honywood recipes is that the compiler E. Layfield suffered from gout himself, and he asked for recipes from members of his circle for some insight toward relief.

[1] Wellcome MS 4338, fol. 206.

[2] The Historical  Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, MS 10a214, fol. 224.

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.

Teaching Recipes

Nearly every year, I teach a senior seminar in the English department at the University of Texas, Arlington (near Dallas) that changes thematically each time.  With the recent proliferation of both cookbooks and books about cooking, I decided this spring to try out a class that focused on literature that features recipes as a major component, and, as a kind of juxtaposition to the literature, I also wanted to consider recipes as a literary pursuit.  Students would delve into texts that exhibit literary, lyrical, and aesthetic sensibilities about recipe-writing and recipe-execution, and that mark particular cultural shifts in food praxis and politics. At the same time, students would study how recipe writing calls upon a host of literary and cultural practices.

The literature that we read was primarily contemporary novels, including Annia Ciezadlo’s Day of Honey, Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate and Nicole Mones’s The Last Chinese Chef, though we also read M.F.K. Fisher’s classic work, How to Cook a Wolf.   For the recipe side, we read Hervé This’s Molecular Gastronomy and Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse Café Cookbook. But, as I am an early modernist by training, I also wanted the students to be exposed to earlier recipes to understand how recipes have developed and changed in the last four hundred years.

Here the class intersected with my own research interest in women’s manuscript receipt book writing of sixteenth and seventeenth century England and with my involvement with the newly formed digital humanities group, Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC), many of whose members write for this blog.  I was inspired by Lisa Smith’s autumn class, “Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe,” who had worked on transcribing Johanna St. John’s recipe book. (See her blog post “An Experiment in Teaching Recipe Transcription,” April 12, 2013.)  I was also working in tandem with Rebecca Laroche, who teaches at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, as we decided that we would have our students transcribe the same seventeenth-century recipe book, so that the text could be double-keyed.  Rebecca and I chose Jane Baber’s receipt book, available in digitized form from the Wellcome Library, because it was short, only twenty-six pages, and in a hand, we thought, that was not too difficult.  Our students would code their transcriptions in XML on the Textual Communities crowd-sourcing transcription platform, run by the University of Saskatchewan.

With a couple of exceptions, the students in the class were senior English majors so they were used to reading and writing about literature. Reading and transcribing early modern writing, however, was something that they had never encountered before–and the task seemed at first quite daunting.  To teach the skill of transcribing, Rebecca and I had students utilize the online Cambridge handwriting course, which moves progressively through more and more difficult early modern handwriting.  My class met on Thursdays in a computer classroom, and we devoted the class period to transcription.  What I noticed was that students started working collectively on the transcriptions, and such communal learning made all the parties stronger transcribers.

So when it finally came to transcribing Baber’s receipt book, I decided to have them work in groups.  What we all noticed was that the group work allowed everyone a safety net to have the confidence to do difficult work, with as much accuracy as possible. I also learned a lot about transcribing from the students as they experimented with various techniques, such as using a tablet or large T.V. to look at the recipe while writing the transcription on a laptop. Students became tenacious in figuring out what words could be, looking them up in the Oxford English Dictionary or in a Google search.  They also struggled to learn to code in XML and to make everything work correctly on the Textual Communities site.

Throughout the semester, students had to write short, researched analytical commentaries, and in the next few days some students from the class will be posting their discoveries about Jane Baber’s recipes.  I am sure you will enjoy their discoveries, and it is exciting to see such keen interest in these receipt book manuscripts.

 

Jane Baber 1r                              Jane Baber 6r

Just who is this Johanna St. John?!?

By Elaine Leong

This week I have the honour of giving a talk at Lydiard House and Park near Swindon.  Until the beginning of the 20th century, Lydiard House and Park was the country estate of the St. John family.  Regular readers of this blog are, of course, already familiar with Johanna St. John and her late-seventeenth century recipe book.

Wellcome Western MS 4338. Image from Wellcome Library, London.

In the fall of 2012, Lisa Smith’s students at the University of Saskatchewan spent part of their semester transcribing Johanna’s book.  You might recall reading some of their blog posts in December. Over the last year or so, Lydiard House and Park’s archivist, Sophie Cummings, and her team of volunteers have also been hard at work transcribing Johanna’s book and in bringing Johanna’s medical activities to a modern audience through a play staged by a youth theatre group, family education events and evening talks.  At this point, you might well ask, who is this Johanna St. John and why does she merit so much attention?

Anon., Portrait of Lady Johanna St. John circa 1690, Image from Lydiard House and Park.

Johanna St. John, or Lady J as she is nicknamed by the Lydiard group, was the eldest daughter Oliver St. John, a prominent Parliamentarian and supporter of Oliver Cromwell. Johanna (1631-1705) married her distant cousin Sir Walter St. John, MP for Wootton Bassett and Wiltshire.  Their grandson, Henry the first Viscount Bolingbroke was a well-known politician, diplomatist and author.  During their marriage, Sir Walter and Lady Johanna divided their time between their mansion in Battersea and their country estate, Lydiard House near Swindon.  Remarkably, an extensive set of correspondence between Johanna and her Lydiard steward Thomas Hardyman has survived. These letters indicate that Lydiard Park, far from being simply a summer home for the St. Johns, supplied them with all sorts of foodstuffs from fruits, herbs and flowers grown in the gardens to cheeses, butter and poultry from the nearby farms.

Johanna’s letters are a fascinating read and provide a rare glimpse into the housewifely concerns of a late seventeenth-century gentlewoman. They paint a picture of an active household manager who expressed great interest and concern in various foodstuffs and homemade products (from butter to cheese to beer to distilled medicines) produced at Lydiard.  Not one to shy away from micromanagement, Johanna instructed Hardyman when to start fattening the turkeys and geese for Christmas feasts, berated him when he dared to send up unripe cheeses and gave him precise barley malt to hogshead ratios for the brewing of beer.  Most interestingly, the correspondence also reveals that Johanna was in the habit of sending recipes gathered from her London acquaintances to be made up at Lydiard Park where she relied on a team of expert distillers and herb gatherers. Johanna’s detailed instructions, including specific directions to contact local experts for particular ingredients, give a clear picture of how one gentlewoman can ‘make’ medicines via ‘remote control’.

An image of a woman distilling taking from the frontispiece of J.S., ‘The accomplished ladies rich closet of rarities’ (London, 1691).

When taken together, Johanna’s recipe book and letters reveal both complex networks of contemporary lay medical knowledge amongst family members and paints a vivid picture of medical activities in an early modern English country house. Our collective transcription of Johanna’s book renders the work electronically searchable and (very soon) widely available.  We hope that it goes one step towards analyzing and acknowledging the complex set of activities taken on by early modern housewives and, in Johanna’s case, her large crew of ‘helpers’.