Review of Secrets of the 17th Century Medicine Cabinet by Katherine Knight, The History Press 2024

[sheenaghpugh]

Use three Physicians still; First Doctor Quiet, Next Doctor Merry-man, and Doctor Dyet.
 - From Sir John Harington’s translation into English of the Regimen Sanitatis Salerni

“Avoid stress, keep cheerful and eat the right things” is not bad advice for maintaining good health, and a feature of this book is that it does not spend much time mocking the supposed credulity and ignorance of our ancestors. There are of course some outlandish “cures” that can only have made matters worse. But as Knight points out, quite apart from the state of medical knowledge at the time, most people simply could not afford a qualified doctor – as Nicholas Culpeper observed in a bit of tart wordplay, “Too many Physitians in England being like Balaams Asse, they will not speak unless they see an Angel.”

People were therefore driven back on their own knowledge and resources, and “people” generally meant housewives, who were responsible for keeping their families healthy as they were for feeding them. Medicine, in an everyday context, seems to have been viewed as a rather specialised branch of cookery – indeed this was how the author, from an original interest in historical cookery, came to research the subject -  and the “household books” that many women kept contained recipes and remedies indiscriminately mixed: “in 1699 a cure for urinary gravel appears between recipes for potted tongue and potted herrings”.

Most of these remedies were of course herbal and relied on knowledge, or assumed knowledge, passed down generations. When this was observational, the result of trial and error or of watching what animals ate to relieve pain, it often worked. The use of onion juice to treat burns, for instance, was based on the work of Ambroise Paré, a French surgeon of the sixteenth century, who pioneered more humane and effective methods of treating battle wounds, and since, as we now know, onion has antibiotic properties, it would have helped the damaged tissue to resist infection. And Lady Egerton’s remedy for “greensickness” in girls, which involved dissolving iron hobnails, looks less eccentric when one realises that greensickness was probably a form of anaemia.

Remedies were less useful when based either on the ancient medical knowledge of men like Galen which, though outdated, had acquired a sort of unchallengeable authority, or on superstition and sympathetic magic – eg, yellow plants would be good for jaundice. And some herbal cures would have been of more use if their authors had not crammed in as many herbs as they could think of, presumably either on the basis that more was better, or in hopes that one of the many might prove curative. In fact though, the effect of one ingredient might well counteract that of another, while boiling them to intensify their essence might also destroy much of their virtue.

Indeed some of the receipts are fiendishly complicated and would have taken days to prepare. Knight suggests, plausibly, that the amount of work involved may have been as much to relieve the home physician’s feelings as the patient’s condition. Referring to a medicine for advanced TB, a condition which was almost certainly going to be fatal, she says:

“It is a ‘raire watter’ distilled from a cock, half a gallon of sack, milk, dried fruit, herbs, rose water, hartshorn and china root – plus sugar candy, gold, musk, ambergris, horn of unicorn and bezoar stone. Very expensive, but when a life was obviously ebbing it may have helped to realise how much one was prized by the family who were paying for these costly ingredients. As far as the family was concerned, too, perhaps they felt that they had done their utmost for the patient.”

The mention of gold among the ingredients is interesting.  As late as the mid-20th century the tubercular George Mackay Brown was being given injections of gold which probably did no good and were certainly potentially toxic. We may no longer tie dismembered tench to the stomach to cure jaundice, and we know that tobacco, far from being the panacea Culpeper thought it, caused his early death, but we are perhaps not so far removed from our ancestors as we might think: sick folk and their relatives still hope for miracles and sometimes look for them in bizarre places. Richard Burton (the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, not the actor or the explorer) remarked “We see commonly the toothache, gout, […] and many such maladies cured by spells, words, characters and charms […] All the world knows there is no virtue in such charms or cures, but a strong conceit and opinion alone”. In other words, vis medicatrix naturae, the impulse of the body to heal itself, can sometimes be aided by what we would now call the placebo effect, the feeling of being valued and looked after.

There are amusing moments in this book, but the feeling it left me with was one of sympathy for ordinary people, usually the women who kept those “household books”, who were doing the best they could in the face of diseases they knew very little about.