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CHAPTER THE SECOND.

DIGRESSION CONCERNING MEDICAL NOTIONS AT THE PERIOD OF SETTLEMENT.

I.

The circulation of the blood.

To the historian of medicine the early seventeenth century seems a period of brilliant discovery, for, in 1616, while Virginia was yet in its birth throes, William Harvey first expounded to his students the circulation of the blood, which he published to the world twelve years later.[1] But to the student of culture history the stubborn resistance offered to this capital discovery is one of the many signs of the thralldom of the age to tradition. So unusual was the spectacle of a man questioning the conclusions of the ancients that Harvey was accounted “crack-brained,” his practice declined, and a pack of “barking dogs,” as he calls them, were soon baying at him. “Would you have us believe that you know something that Aristotle did not know?” demanded one adversary, Dr. Primrose. “Aristotle observed everything,” he adds, “and no one should dare to come after him.”[2] The voice of Primrose is the voice of that age. It is said that no man over forty years old accepted Harvey’s new physiology. Half a century after Harvey’s discovery the medical faculty of Paris,

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noted for its spotless orthodoxy, solemnly petitioned the French king to prohibit the teaching of the circulation, as a doctrine contrary to the authority of Aristotle.[1] Against the plated hulk of this conservatism Boileau let fly a broadside of derision in the shape of a burlesque decree, in which among other things the court “forbids the blood to be any longer vagabond, wandering and circulating about the body, on pain of being wholly given over to the faculty of Paris to be let without measure.”[2] Harvey “gave to anatomy its most illustrious discovery, . . . and to philosophy its first real alliance with experience,” says a German writer,[3] and we like to linger over the story of the most shining intellectual achievement of the century. But its relation to anatomical knowledge in America in the seventeenth century is small. It is probable that few of the earlier doctors and chirurgeons who came to the colonies were interested in the question raised by Harvey. It is certainly improbable that anything new in science ever came into possession of the barbers and bloodletters and bonesetters who practiced the rougher sort of surgery and physic in England and the pioneer settlements of America, nor would novelties of any sort influence the practice of traditional medicine by the preacher of the parish or some jack-at-all-trades who served as justice of the peace, medical adviser, and neighborhood wiseacre. Still less would there be any advance in that “kitchen physic,” as the colonists were accustomed to call it, that was so

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liberally dispensed by midwives and knowing house mothers who revered neither Galen nor Hippocrates, but followed mediæval traditions and employed remedies that may have been older than the father of medicine himself. In 1660 the circulation of the blood was argued in a master’s thesis at Harvard, which institution seems to have been about that time hospitable to new opinions in science. This was thirty-two years after Harvey’s treatise had appeared. The circulation of the blood was still a question at Harvard in 1699.[1]

II.

Humorism.

That which one age tells to another seems to men truth fundamental.[2] From antiquity it had been told and retold with much formality that the human body consisted of four elements—earth, air, fire, and water—and that it contained just four humors or liquids corresponding neatly in number with the four elements.[3] These humors were bile or choler, blood, melancholy or black bile, and phlegm. In the mystical science of that time a mysterious relation or correspondence was supposed to exist between each of the several elements and one of the four humors.[4] Anne Bradstreet, the beginner of New England poetry, sets it forth in rhyme, that choler was the daughter of fire, blood of air, melancholy of earth, and phlegm of water. Disease came from an excess of one or another humor, or from a humor’s being too cold

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or too hot, or too moist or too dry. The four humors, offspring of the four elements, had these four qualities, cold, heat, moisture, and dryness, which were something other than what we mean by these terms. Each of these qualities might exist in either one of four degrees of intensity, not only in the humors but in the food and remedies. A writer in 1603 estimates the possible mixtures and wrong-goings of the four humors at eighty thousand.[1] [2] This afforded a system of diagnosis fairly bewildering and impressive to the patient. The belief that the humors wrongly mixed or tempered affected the mood of a sufferer was a commonplace of the literature of the period. “Humor . . . some time hath his hour with every man,” says Shakespeare’s Portia to Brutus.[3] Certain forms of speech that gave expression to humoral theories still persist as petrifactions of extinct notions. The words humor, temperament, bilious, choleric, atrabilious, melancholy, phlegmatic, and others, are veritable fossils of the Galenic age.[4] The numerous simples, such as sassafras and sarsaparilla, that are yet decocted to remove morbid humors and “purify the blood,” are but remains of Galenism, and nostrums that restore health by invigorating the liver show the survival in folk-science of the old physiology that gave supremacy to that organ, or of the theory of ancient medicine that “the liver is made up from the roots of the veins” and that it was the center of life, the desires of the soul being there seated.[5]

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III.

Common remedies.

The physicians of the seventeenth century were acquainted with the properties of many valuable simples. They had a set of astringents and cathartics handed down from antiquity.[1] Some of the latter are so drastic that nothing could have justified their use but the necessity for evacuating humors which had a depraved way of going wrong and sending up poisonous vapors to the brain, to the injury of those imaginary “animal spirits” which played a leading part in the physiology of the age.[2] The several purgative remedies were supposed to act specifically, each on one or more particular humor; one thing was needed for phlegm and quite another to remove the black bile that weighed on the spirits of a hypochondriac.[3] The favorite and perhaps the most destructive remedy of that time was venesection. Hippocrates had used it with caution, thinking it best in the spring time.[4] Galen forbade bloodletting in the case of persons under fourteen or over seventy years old. But in the seventeenth century it was inflicted on men, women, and children for almost every pathological offense.[5] Louis XIII was bled forty-seven times in twelve months.[6] Infants of three days and men past eighty were thus depleted: the “peccant” humors had to be expelled. Venesection was supposed to be local in its effects and a vein was opened in the head for troubles in the head.[7] The French when depleting

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generally opened a vein on each side of the body, supposing in their ignorance of the circulation that otherwise it would require twenty-four hours to restore by some process an equilibrium.[1] [2] The great surgeon Paré drew seven pounds of blood, troy weight, from a man in four days; and there was a case in England of almost as severe a treatment inflicted on a man seventy-six years of age.[3] Bleeding was used by barbers and other humble practitioners. In the American colonies it was practiced by the half-taught chirurgeon, as well as by clergymen and other medical amateurs and dabblers, to whom the old almanacs pointed out the proper time of the moon for letting blood according to the age of the patient.[4]

IV.

Medical sects.

The great medical controversies which the early seventeenth century had received by way of legacy from past ages wakened few echoes in America. The Latin countries generally held to Greek and Arabian traditions, while the Germans were following the insurgent Paracelsus and the chemical school—doctors of fire, or pyrotechnics, as they called themselves.[5] But the seventeenth century was a period of approach and attempted reconciliation.[6] Pott, the English physician who was sent to Virginia in its early years, was thought all the better qualified because he had studied in the Low Countries, and was acquainted with chemistry. He

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appears to have combined Galenical with the chemical methods, and there were other eclectics at the time. Some stiff Galenists in England were suspected of using spagyric methods surreptitiously.[1] If any allusion to medical sects was made in the newly planted colonies, no record of it has come down to us; the people, in their necessities, availed themselves eagerly of any science or promising quackery or ignorant folk-physic that offered relief, reserving all their polemics for theology.[2] One finds remedies dating back to Galen and Hippocrates standing on the family medicine shelf of nearly every plantation house of Virginia; the Oriental bezoar stone of somebody in the middle ages and the ancient dittany of the Greeks were prescribed by colonial doctors.[3] But in the little medical libraries Glauber’s Chemistry holds up its head alongside of Galen’s Art of Physic, and even the Unlearned Chemist ventures to keep company with Ambrose Paré’s Surgery.[1] In New England, as in Virginia, Barrough’s Method of Phisicke was the accepted handbook for nearly a hundred years. Wigglesworth had Barrough with Harvey and Culpepper; but it is significant that several Paracelsian books, such as the Basilica Chymica, were their friendly shelf neighbors. One is forced to conclude from the collections of books that colonial medicine at least was rather inclusive.[1] Governor Winthrop, of Connecticut, whose influence must have modified medical practice in New England appears to have belonged to the chemical

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school, and to have held strongly to hermetic medicine of various kinds.

V.

Signaturism.

The doctrine of signatures, so often ascribed to Paracelsus and strongly upheld by him, pervaded medical theory in the colonies. The notion was, indeed, as old as Hippocrates himself, and probably yet more ancient, since it is found in the primitive medical theory of savages.[1] But writers of the Paracelsian school of the sixteenth century amplified, emphasized, intricated, and mysticized the doctrine in such a way as to make it seem almost an original discovery of their own time. Theories were accepted in that day for poetic rather than scientific reasons. Whatever thought was reached by symbolism, or uttered obscurely or mystically, impressed the susceptible imagination of the age. The imagination then held the place of authority that rightly belongs to the judgment. The later and elaborate doctrine of signatures was a part of the prevalent philosophy of correspondences. It was related to the influence of the planets on plants and minerals, which influence was shown by color and other qualities and had to do with medical properties. It was a part also of an obscure theory of sympathy and antipathy existing in inanimate things—a doctrine suggested apparently by the magnet.[2] It belonged to the overshadowing supernaturalism of the time,

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and to the geocentric and homocentric notions of the universe that gave value to things only in their relation to man. The world was a cosmic pharmacy; God had placed a signature on each substance to indicate the disease it was good for. What was necessary was to read the label, to note the indications of odor, color, form, and other marks. The resemblance was often wholly external. “Like by like is to be cured—that is, similar ulcers by similar forms,” says Paracelsus.[1] The porosity of the leaves of St. John’s-wort, and the spots which resembled perforations of the leaf, left no doubt of the value of the plant in all cases of abrasion, external or internal. The illusory appearance of holes in its leaves showed it good for hallucinations, madness, and assaults of the devil. This curious theory of medicine is to be detected in many of the remedies prescribed in the colonies, and is yet more evident in the popular modes of healing.

VI.

Dr. Stafford’s paper.

We may see the influence of the theory of signatures on English medicine in actual transit to the colonies by examining a paper sent by Dr. Stafford, of London, to Winthrop, Governor of Connecticut, the most noted master of medicine in the early colonial period. In this paper are remedies which must have been often prescribed in New England. Stafford cured “madnesse” with St. John’s-wort “sometimes in five days.” Paracelsus had treated

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the fibers of its leaves as a signature, showing that this plant was good to drive away “phantasms and specters.”[1] But the doctrine of “curing by the assimulate” was perhaps present even in superstitions before the time of Paracelsus; the water of St. John’s-wort was used to drive away devils, and the herbs St. John’s-wort and rue were blessed after a prescribed form, wrapped in a “hallowed paper,” and carried about “to be smelled at” against all “invasions of the devil.”[2] The inhabitants of North Wales put sprigs of it over their doors as an antidote to demons.[3] Stafford gave sweet milk with salt for “jaunders.” Milk, being white, cleared black humors. This was “contraries cured by contraries,” but Stafford used both methods in one remedy; he added saffron to his milk and salt for jaundice, and this was “curing by the assimulate,” a yellow remedy for a yellow disease. If a patient were torn by pains in the breast or limbs, Stafford cured like by like; he bade him wear a “wild catt’s skin on the place grieved.”[4] But our London doctor’s masterpiece, as communicated to Connecticut, appears to have been his “black powder” against smallpox and other eruptive diseases. It was made of toads because toads were believed to be poisonous, and all poison drew poison to itself, and thus cured disease, as the author of the Triumphal Chariot of Antimony had long before proved.[5] This also was one mode of curing by the assimulate. But the warts on the toad were perhaps regarded as a specific divine indorsement

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of his value against eruptions. “In the month of March,” says Stafford, with the usual particularity of time, “take toads as many as you will alive; putt them in an earthen pott, so that it may be half full; cover it with a broad tyle or Iron plate; then overwhelme the pott so that the bottome may be uppermost; putt charcoales round about it and over it. . . . Sett it on fire and lett it burne out and extinguish of itselfe; when it is cold take out the toades; and in an Iron mortar pound them very well.” By a second roasting this brown toad powder was reduced to a black, innocuous animal char-coal. “Moderate the dose according to the strength of the partie,” says Stafford gravely. A toad boiled in oil, “after the toad has fasted two or three days,” he recommends for king’s evil.

[1] With an exactitude characteristic of the medicine of the day he mixes a plaster not with simple hog’s lard, but with “barrow’s grease.”[2] Subtlety of this sort pervaded every department of thought; the little that was known of science had rather dazed than clarified vision.

VII.

Weapon ointment and sympathetic powder.

Beside the doctrine of signatures and a superstitious etiquette in the preparation of remedies, there were other curious results of the mystical tendency in the medicine of the time—the weapon ointment derived from the Rosicrucians, for ex-ample. It was compounded of many absurdities; there was pulverized bloodstone, a cure by likes,

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and there was also moss taken from the skull of a dead man unburied and other ghastly ingredients.[1] This precious unguent was applied, not to the wound, but to the weapon or implement that had produced it. The weapon was then carefully bandaged, to protect it from the air. It was the wound, however, that was healed; the cures are well attested, as impossible cures usually are. Experiment proved that “a more homely and familiar ointment” would serve the turn just as well, and moreover, in that day of emblemism, the ointment proved quite as efficacious when applied to an image of the offending weapon. To the Rosicrucians was attributed also a similar cure which came into great notoriety in England in the middle of the seventeenth century. This was the widely famous sympathetic powder made of vitriol with much ceremonial precision. The powder stopped hæmorrhages either from disease or wounds. It was applied to the blood after it had issued from the wound or to the blood-stained garment.[2] Winthrop, of Connecticut, imported the latest books on the subject of this powder, which may well have come into use in a new country where surgical cases were not infrequent.[3] Before Winthrop’s time, and after, German writers on medicine attempted to give a scientific basis to the weapon ointment and powder of sympathy by attributing their operation to magnetism, a term that has covered more ignorance than any other ever invented.[4] The philosopher Kenelm Digby, a contemporary

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of Winthrop, made himself the protagonist of the powder in a treatise on the subject.[1] Lord Bacon was in some doubt about the weapon ointment, but he rather inclined to believe in its cures, because a distinguished lady had similarly relieved him of warts by rubbing them with a rind of pork, which was then hung up, fat side to the sun, to waste vicariously away, carrying his warts into non-existence with it.[2] Roberti, the Jesuit, believed that such cures took place, but ascribed them to the devil; all these cures that were wrought without “contaction,” including the home-made witchcraft for curing warts, Bishop Hall accounted damnable sorceries.[3] Of such necromancy, this cure of warts with a rind of pork has alone survived to modern times. The rag-bag of folk-medicine is filled with the cast-off clothes of science.[4]

VIII.

Potable gold.

The seventeenth century lay in the penumbra of the middle ages, and the long-sought potable gold of the alchemists was yet in request; it even enjoyed a revival. Almost everything precious and rare was accounted of medicinal virtue, and it was inferred that gold as the most precious metal would be the most valuable remedy if it could be taken in liquid form.[5] [6] The known usefulness of mercurial remedies was attributed to the fact that mercury was the densest of liquids. Gold was the densest metal then known, and it

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was easily decided, by the process of using fancy to give fluidity to logic, that if it could be reduced to drinkable consistency it would be the most valuable of medicaments. There was a yet more convincing way of proving its medicinal value by the process of presumption, so much used by hermetic philosophers. The sun and gold were related in the mystical thought of the time; the sun as chief luminary was “lord in the property” of gold.[1] “There is not found among things above or things beneath,” says Glauber, “a greater harmony and friendship than that between the sun, gold, man, and wine.”[2] The easy logic of the time found in this transcendental fancy a “therefore” potent enough to make gold a universal remedy for human maladies, where the recovery was not “contrary to the unfathomable counsel of God.”[3] Gold was even administered in its solid state; Arabic doctors had prescribed leaf gold, and it held place in several compounds.[4] Fragments and leaves of gold were seethed with meats, and the broth used to clear the heart and raise the strength and vital spirits of invalids beyond all conception.[5] But the hermetic writers thought the use of leaf gold a coarse application of a metal which they were fond of styling “the lower Sun.” Preparations professing to be potable gold and tincture of gold were in much request and frequently administered in the seventeenth century. On the other hand, their efficacy was warmly debated.[6] The alchemists held that three drops at the highest taken in wine or

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beer would cure the most serious illness. Of its nature it is more than enough for us to know that it was triplex, being vegetable, animal, and mineral; it was one thing chosen out of all others, of a livid color, metallic, limpid and fluid, hot and moist, watery and swarthy, a living oil and a living tincture, a mineral stone and a water of life of wonderful efficacy.[1] So spake the admiring alchemist.

John Winthrop the younger, of whom we have spoken, was a man of an eager and curious mind, fond of peering into the occult. He dabbled in alchemy as well as astrology, and on his shelves were many of the latest works on potable gold. A poet of his time says of him:

He left a son Wait who inherited his father’s fondness for prescribing, and who like his father was an adept in panaceas, and was believed to have golden secrets and secrets more precious than gold, “unknown to Hippocrates and Helmont.”[2] Doubtless many New-Englanders were dosed by the revered Winthrops with the tincture of the sun, potable gold, made by marrying in some fashion the “masculine gold” to the “feminine mercury,” and possessing all virtues—vegetable, mineral, and animal—“destroying the Root and Seminaries of all malignant and poisonous diseases.”[3]

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IX.

Theriac and remedies of serpent’s flesh.

Weapon ointment, sympathetic powder, potable gold, were much thought of, but the authorized pharmacopœias ignored these Gothic medicines that traced their origin to alchemists and Rosicrucians. Yet the notion of a universal antidote was in regular medicine as well. Primitive science, having no reins on the imagination, longs for perfection, seeks the universal, and dreams of great discoveries. Back through a long line of medical writers we may trace the belief in the virtues of theriac and mithridate to Galen and into the centuries before Galen. The accepted story of its origin is that Mithridates, King of Pontus, by a series of experiments on criminals, had found out, or thought he had found out, what medicaments would neutralize various poisons. These he put together for a universal antidote. Andromachus, physician to Nero, changed the constitution of the remedy somewhat, adding the flesh of the viper, probably on the principle of curing like by like. This remedy of Andromachus was the famous theriac which was so much lauded by Galen and which imposed itself even on modern times.[1] It was expelled from the British Pharmacopœia only in the middle of the eighteenth century by a bare majority of one vote in the college. It contained more than sixty ingredients, and was commonly known in England as Venice treacle.[2] Not only all poisons but many diseases were supposed to be

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conquerable by this universal remedy. Numerous other preparations of viper’s flesh were in use; things poisonous were thought to contain much virtue.[1] What theriac was used in the colonies was no doubt made abroad. In less complicated preparations the American rattlesnake was made to take the place held for thousands of years by its rival in virulence, the European viper.[2] The flesh of the rattlesnake was fed to the infirm, perhaps in broths as the viper was given for ages, and as the Scotch used the adder.[3] His gall mixed with chalk was made into “snake balls” and given internally; his heart was dried and powdered and drunk in wine or beer to cure the venom of the snake, on the ancient principle of curing by likes.[4] In Virginia the oil of the snake was recommended for gout,[5] while in frosty New England the fat was, if we may believe Josselyn, “very sovraign for frozen limbs . . . and sprains.”[6] The American backwoodsman of to-day, perhaps unconsciously, uses a homely substitute for the viper wine or theriacal wine of other times when he soaks the flesh of the rattlesnake in spirits to make “bitters” against rheumatism.

X.

Bezoar.

There was yet another universal antidote recognized in the regular medicine of the time. The bezoar or bezar stone was a concretion taken from the intestines of wild goats and other animals. That brought from the Orient was accounted most

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valuable. It was used at first in the East as an amulet; there were other remedies of olden times that served their purpose just as well when worn about the person as when taken medicinally. A “stone” found in so unusual a place excited wonder, and there grew up a mythical notion of its origin. This particular wild goat, in the opinion of the sixteenth century, indulged itself on occasion in a diet of poisonous snakes. To cool the burning produced in its stomach by this debauch, the creature plunged into the water. On coming out it sought and ate of health-giving herbs, and as a result the bezoar was concreted in its vitals.[1] The cost of the bezoar, the “queen of poisons,” was great. “If you take too much, your purse will soon complain,” says a medical writer in 1661.[2] The concretions of the “mountain goat” were the original bezoar, but any intestinal formation of the kind came to be considered bezoar. In Java the viscera of the porcupine were eagerly searched for such deposits, and one of these worthless things called a pedro porco was sold for the price of pearls.[3] There were ruminants in Chili and Peru that yielded bezoars, which ranked second to those of the East; Mexico contributed a lower grade still.[4] Finding these stones valuable, the shrewd Indians learned to counterfeit them, and as they were of all sizes, colors, and forms, and there was no test of fineness, there were others than natives who knew how to sophisticate, so that the famous powder magisterial

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of bezoar often probably contained nothing of the kind. The remedy was used in the colonies. Clayton, the parson who was in Virginia before 1690, tells of a skillful woman physician there who gave pulverized “oriental bezoar stone” in the case of a man bitten by a rattlesnake and followed it with a decoction of dittany, the same at least in name with that ancient remedy which Venus applied to the wound of her son Æneas, and to which the wild goats in those knowing times resorted when the winged arrows of the hunters were sticking in their sides.[1] [2] We get a notion of the persistence of medical tradition when we find administered in Virginia an antidote brought into Europe from the East in the middle ages and an orthodox simple derived from the remotest Greek antiquity, and both of them probably without merit.[3]

XI.

American herbs.

This magic of dittany has much instruction for us who study the genesis of colonial medicine. Not only Cretan dittany, but white dittany as well, was esteemed efficacious against the poison of “serpents, mad dogs, and venomous beasts.” Medical theory was very expansive. Because the plant that grew on the Cretan mountain sides was fabled to expel the barbed arrows that remained in the wounds of the wild goats, Cretan dittany and white dittany were accounted potent not only to cure poison, but to extract bits of wood or bone

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from wounds, and to remove foreign bodies of all sorts, and even to assist in parturition. Dittany was such an antagonist to poison that Gerarde is quoted as saying, “The very smell driveth away venomous beasts, and doth astonish them.” Whether the Virginia doctors mentioned in the preceding section cured the rattlesnake’s bite by using Cretan or white dittany, or perhaps by neither, is not certain, for by a curious process the name and virtues of dittany had before this time been transferred to American pennyroyal, which appears to have been still more astonishing to a snake than dittany. Captain Silas Taylor told the learned Royal Society, ever eager in that day to hear of marvelous discoveries from returning travelers, that in 1657 he had held to the nose of an unwilling rattlesnake the bruised leaves of “wild pennyroyal, or dittany, of Virginia.”[1] The serpent was killed by the antidote in half an hour. Other virtues of dittany were ascribed to pennyroyal in New York; here it was also used against rattle-snakes.[2] But the name dittany, or American dittany, was presently settled by early Virginia botanists on Cunila Americana, and the miraculous virtues ascribed to Cretan dittany anciently, and later to European species and to pennyroyal, were finally attached to the so-called American dittany.[3] [4]

It was by such processes that many American herbs became medicinal. A fancied resemblance caused the name of a European plant to be transferred, sometimes to more than one American species,

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and with the name was carried over the traditional virtues.[1] Favorite herbs were transplanted from English gardens to those of colonial house mothers, who even took pains to cultivate in America the wild plants they had been wont to pluck for simples from English hedgerows.[2] But the seeds of English weeds emigrated by smuggling themselves with better company, and the hardy vagabonds of English roadsides gained an easy advantage over the feebler natives of the American banks. Herbs from Europe soon put on the airs of native Americans. There was no lack, therefore, of old acquaintances for simples, and the wild woods were full of new plants and animals presumed to be of pharmaceutical value, for the idealism of the time denied that anything was superfluous. “We have the Scriptures to back it,” says Josselyn, “that God created nothing in vain.”[3]

XII.

Botanical researches

The search for new remedies in the bewildering jumble of hitherto unknown plants revealed by the discovery of America gave a new interest to botany, which was the foremost of the biological sciences in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Jesuit missionaries in South America learned from the natives the medicinal value of the bark of the cinchona tree,[4] in 1632, and it was at length introduced into European medicine.[5] This was the greatest trophy of botanical research in

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the New World, though the Old World met the discovery with stubborn prejudice and resistance. The brilliant results achieved in malarial diseases by the use of Jesuits’ or Peruvian bark after its general introduction into Europe, about the middle of the century, probably awakened expectation of similar discoveries in North America.[1] The traveler Josselyn, who arrived in New England in 1663, was an assiduous herb gatherer; he examined the weeds and woods and wild beasts to find novel remedies, and he has recorded for us the popular applications of many new substances. Glover, and Ciayton the parson,[2] and the botanist Bannister, were observing Virginia plants in the latter part of the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth there were several eminent native botanists, and others came from Europe. To three of these—Balm, a Swede; Schöpf, a German; and Castiglione, an Italian—we owe the most careful observations, not only of the plants but of social conditions in America.

XIII.

Signaturism in America.

But the popular use of American plants and animals did not depend on botanical research. The general belief was that all things were made with reference to man. The wild woods were full of creatures whose value was written on each of them in the language of signatures, if the seeker for simples could only manage to decipher the

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label with which it had been considerately tagged at the creation. If we look into Josselyn’s list of American remedies, we shall see how much painful observation and investigation had been saved by this shopkeeper scheme of Nature. The bark of the board-pine was naturally good for the skin; rosin gathered on the bark was used for outward application; turpentine procured by incisions was “excellent to heal wounds and cuts.” Even cosmetic applications were probably suggested in the same way; green pine cones having a corrugated surface were good to remove wrinkles from the face; water distilled from them was “laid on with cloths.”[1] The familiar kidney bean, first known to Europeans in the gardens of the American savages, was “good to strengthen the kidneys,” as anybody might know at sight. The signature might be “internal” as well as external, and very opposite deductions were sometimes made. The French thought that the mottled eggs of the American turkey bred leprosy, but the English colonists thought that the similar eggs of the turkey buzzard were able to “restore decayed nature exceedingly.”[2] From some association of symbolism the brains of the shark and jelly from the head of the drumfish were thought to assist in obstetric cases.[3] Brickell, a medical man, records the fact that the pit of the Carolina haw was thought serviceable in cases of “the stone, gravel, and dropsy, and he recommends the brains of the screech awl for headache.[4] As in Europe signaturism

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would seem to have had its first lodgment in the superstitious use of amulets, so in America like cured like when merely worn about the person.[1] In New England the fangs of wolves were strung about the necks of children to save them from fright; and the cast-off skin of the rattlesnake was worn as a girdle to facilitate parturition.[2] The practice must have been pretty general, since we find it in Connecticut and Pennsylvania. No doubt the custom which still obtains in malarial regions of wearing a necklace of caterpillars to cure ague by shuddering, antedates the discovery of Peruvian bark.[3] In the seventeenth century a spider inclosed in a nutshell, wrapped in silk and hung about the neck so as to touch the skin, “did much to drive away intermittent fevers more quickly.”[4] In England the patient was sometimes dosed with the spider, and the practice is still known in English folk-medicine.[5] In the valley of the Ohio, spider-web pills are given by rustics to cure ague. The use of spiders in some form against intermittents is more than two thousand years old; Greek physicians, before the beginning of the Christian era, put a plaster of them on the patient’s forehead.[6]

It is to be remembered that in the ages before science it was held that in case of recovery there must have been a remedy. Nothing got well of itself. Now we know that the great majority of ills will heal themselves. In every case of spontaneous healing in that time a remedy was looked

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XIV.

for, and so nearly everything was believed to be a remedy for something.

Animal remedies.

Many remedies were in use in the early colonial practice and in Europe that seem to have had nothing to recommend them except an unconfessed notion that disgust was curative, and the belief that nothing was made in vain.[1] Pulverized butterflies, crickets, and grasshoppers are not the worst of these by several degrees. Sowbugs were highly esteemed; earwigs and emmets, which sometimes crept into the ears, were good for deafness and were given in oil; tumblebugs for some reason cured rabies, and bedbugs were valuable in lying-in cases, perhaps from their clinical associations. Even more intimate vermin were given alone or put into compounds.[2] [3] The skins, the viscera, and the dejecta of animals were in use, and many of the most loathsome of these substances were found in the regular pharmacopoeias. Human orts and ends were highly prized; the volatile salt of men’s bones was especially “homogeneal to humane nature”; the scrapings of human skulls, human fat, and the liquid called mummy distilled from dead bodies were devoutly believed to have much efficacy. It was only as time wore on that organic chemistry arose to deliver the afflicted from the nauseous and the noxious by dumping whole pharmacopœias of vile medicament into the homogeneal sewers.[4]

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XV.

Indian remedies

The colonists fell into a common error of unscientific men: they overestimated the value of the medical hocus-pocus of the savages. In Pennsylvania they were, in 1696, pronounced “as able physicians as any in Europe.”[1] Indian physic was in great part empty jugglery against imaginary spirits, but in rough-and-ready surgery the savages had some arts useful in the exigencies of forest life.[2] They had herbs for cathartics and emetics; they taught the colonists the use of various roots which they believed to be antidotes for the bite of the rattlesnake.[3] Byrd is able to name nearly a dozen of these supposed antidotes. One of these, the so-called Seneca snakeroot, came into great reputation in Europe as a general medicine. John Clayton the clergyman collected three hundred species of plants used as remedies by the Indians.[4] Quacks in the colonies soon learned the trick of claiming to have medical secrets from the medicine men of the Indians. As early as the beginning of the eighteenth century this cloak for ignorance and imposture was found convenient, and the “Indian” or “botanical” doctor was already plying his trade.[5]

XVI.

Colonial medical men.

It was the usual practice to send out with each “plantation” or settlement a surgeon who knew some physic. One of these was allowed in 1619

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thirty shillings a month. As money then went, thirty shillings would be equal to nearly as many dollars now. Dr. Pott, a Master of Arts, and both chemist and Galenist in training, a somewhat reckless liver, a councilor, and for a short time a temporary governor, was the only physician in Virginia in 1630.[1] Involved in the factional intrigues of the time, only his medical skill saved him from being hanged out of hand for theft by the arbitrary Sir John Harvey. Harvey could not muster courage to put to death the only competent medical man in the whole colony in a time of epidemic. A like indispensableness probably saved Pratt, a surgeon of Cambridge, Mass., from banishment for free speaking. There were in Virginia a good many rough practitioners of one sort or another; in the manuscript county record books of this early period they are called “chirurgeons.”[2] The barber, who practiced minor surgery along with shaving and hairdressing, was a natural outgrowth of the conditions existing in the middle ages.[3] But conditions had changed, and the barber surgeon was in a fair way of extinction from unsuitableness to environment when the colonies were settled. In 1638 a barber surgeon lost his life journeying from Boston to Roxbury in a snowstorm to pull a tooth. In a Virginia inventory of 1640 sixteen kinds of drugs are mixed up with a hone, a razor, a lancet, and four other implements of a surgical barber.[4] In 1652 the surgeons of New Amsterdam petitioned for the exclusive right to

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shave. But a trade profession so widely bifurcated could not survive the first generation in a new country. The settler probably shaved himself in preference to seeking a surgeon to do it, and the barber improved his social rank by putting away his razor and hone and setting up in his medical capacity only. As the higher ranks of the profession were mostly unoccupied, the very word surgeon as a professional distinction disappeared from general use in America. Every smatterer breveted himself physician to fill the vacancy. The so-called bonesetters, of whom we hear very early in New England, must have had predecessors in the mother country. Men with no professional training and little education, they appear to have been expert in the mere joiner work of surgery, as their title implies. The art was often transmitted from father to son, and was sometimes believed to be a natural and hereditary gift. In 1652 the Connecticut General Court employed one of these men for the colony. This appointment of a bonesetter-general indicates the rarity of surgeons in the country when those of the first generation had disappeared. Six years later Boston felt some alarm at the number of people resorting thither for “help in physic and surgery,” and took measures to prevent the town from becoming responsible for the support of any of these patients. Clayton gives an unflattering account of Virginia physicians in the latter part of the century. They were, no doubt, like all the colonial medical men of the time, mere

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country-bred doctors, with the training that could be got from an apprenticeship to the half-educated surgeons, their predecessors. Their standard remedy was “crocus metallorum,” which indeed, says Clayton, “every house keeps, and if their finger, as the saying is, ake but, they give three or four spoonfuls; if this fail, they give him a second dose, then purge them with fifteen or twenty grains of Rosin of Jalap, afterwards sweat them with Venice Treacle, Powder of Snake Root or Gascoin’s Powder.”[1] [2] These failing, the case was given up.

XVII.

Medical parsons and medical women.

From remote times it fell to the lot of the priest, as the only educated man in the parish, to give medical advice; so that medicine was at one time almost wholly in the hands of the clergy and women. This mediæval usage cast its shadow across the following centuries, and some of the clergy who came to America had a fair acquaintance with the medical knowledge of the time. Robert Paulet, who was sent to Virginia as a parson in 1619, appears to have been highly esteemed as a physician; he refused a place in the governor’s council because he could not be spared by the people of his region. Many of the ministers in New England practiced physic, some of them professionally, others apparently gratuitously. There were few educated men in New England or Virginia who did not keep a few medical books and

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perhaps prescribe for their neighbors. Women had for ages practiced medicine. The dependents in the country houses and the tenants on the estates in England and in Europe generally looked to the wife of the master for medical advice. The same conditions persisted until recently on the large plantations in the Southern States, where the mistress was obliged to have her little stock of drugs and her ready traditional rule of prescription for the ordinary maladies. Professional women physicians were not uncommon. In country places in England the “good woman,” as she was called, still lingered; she was “a pretended physician, chirurgeon, and blesser.” She claimed especial skill in counteracting the mischief wrought by witches and demons, and this part of her art was sometimes called “white witchcraft.” Obstetric cases were wholly in the hands of midwives in the earlier colonial period. It was just about this time that Dr. Peter Chamberlen attempted to organize women practitioners of midwifery in England into a company, with himself at their head as president and examiner. As early as 1655 a midwife was officially appointed in New Amsterdam and a house erected for her. The same class of practitioners were in the other colonies, and it was with difficulty that physicians could acquire a portion of the obstetric practice at a later time. There was also a class of women practitioners in many places who did not confine themselves to any one branch of practice and who gave the officinal remedies of

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the time. Clayton mentions one such doctress in Virginia; Byrd at a later period alludes to another. There is a record that this latter, a Mrs. Livingston, of Fredericksburg, was paid a thousand pounds of tobacco by the parish of St. George “for salivating a poor woman, and promising to cure her again if she should be sick again in twelve Months.”[1] In some cases like those of the famous Mrs. Hutchinson, of Boston, the services of a gentlewoman versed in obstetric practice were freely given to her neighbors;[2] the professional doctress of Block Island at a later period was the wife of a rich man.[3] [4] The practice of general medicine by women prevailed in England at the time, and came down from it is hard to say what antiquity, for one of the most famous of all the medical professors of Europe in the eleventh century was a woman.[5] [6]

XVIII.

Decline of medical knowledge.

Colonial medicine declined in character from the beginning. The physicians of the second generation, like the magistrates and clergymen, had much less education than those who came from England. Besides their lack of general culture they had no proper training; the surgeon sent to Massachusetts in 1629 was obligated to take one or more apprentices to learn his art.[7] This apprenticeship was probably all the teaching received by the native practitioners of the seventeenth century and the early eighteenth. It was

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complained, in 1647, that medical students in Massachusetts were “forced to fall to practice before ever they saw an Anatomy made.”[1] The doctors of America could hardly have ranked with the most rustic chirurgeons in England. As the first generation of the American born came on the stage, ignorant quacks and fanatics grew as rank as the English weeds that flourished in the forest mold of a new continent. “We ought by all means,” says a Pennsylvania writer of 1684, “to discountenance all Babylonical Letter-learned physitians both for the Soul and Body.” The medicine of the age was bad enough at its best; worse than the Greek medicine whose traditions it revered and sometimes followed. The first influence of the chemical school had been mainly bad; it was only later that good results came from it. But the seventeenth century was none the less a century of advance; in that age modern scientific medicine was born. Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood is the starting point, not only of modern medicine, but of experimental science as well. His investigations on the subject of generation gave a philosophical basis to comparative anatomy, and thus broadened the field of human thought. In that century the skill of physicians first learned to cope with malarial disease as a result of the introduction of cinchona, the most important of all modern remedies. But the intellectual progress of the time was a narrow current perceptible in the mid-channel of a wide

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and sluggish river whose shore reaches were stagnant marshes and never-changing pools.

Elucidations.

Note 1, Page 50.

There is a pleasant sentence touching this reverence for the traditional in Harvey’s lectures, in which he alludes to the necessity for using the utmost precaution, because he is dealing with an error two thousand years old. “Hinc error 2,000 annorum pridem habitus quare egi obsequatis tabulis quia tam antiqua: a tantis viris culta.” Prelectiones, 78.

Note 2, page 50.

There were other curious notions about the humors. For example, a physician, writing on Tunbridge water in 1670, speaks of phlegm as “the private excrement of the brain at the mouth and nose.” The opinion was no doubt generally held on the authority of Galen’s Medical Definitions, in which the mucus from the nostrils is called “an excrement and sediment of the brain.” Pare says phlegm is blood half concocted and is fit to nourish the brain. English edition, p. 9.

Note 3, page 51.

This “numeral fetichism” may be plainly traced to Galen, and it is evident also in the theory of the “critical days” in disease which Hippocrates announced and which has been accepted in some form down almost to this day. See, for example, Aphorisms of Hippocrates, section ii, 24; iv, 59, 61, 64; and Adams’s references to Galen on these in his edition. Sir Conrad Sprengell’s comment on the former of these, in his English translation of the Aphorisms in 1735, shows the vitality of the notion at a late date. Conrad Sprengell reduces the days to periods, and he hesitates to accept the dictum of Hippocrates, that fevers are apt to return unless they leave the patient on odd days. Compare the short work that Kurt Sprengel, at a later day, makes of this very aphorism in his Apologie des Hippocrates. 1788. The ridicule of Molière has not missed a preciosity so delightful as this reverence for number. In the Malade Imaginaire the physician is asked how many grains of salt should be put into an egg.

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“Six, eight, ten,” is the reply, “in even numbers, as the medicines are to be given in odd numbers.” Act ii, sc. ix. Compare also what Philo Judæus says in eulogy of the number seven and its parts: Creation of the World, chap. xxx, and in chap. xxxv, his citation of an elegy by Solon the lawgiver, dividing life into ten periods of seven years. In the following chapter the division of human life by Hippocrates into seven periods is mentioned. This passion for numeration, thousands of years old, emigrated to America. Anne Bradstreet sings of The Four Humors in the Constitution of Man, The Four Ages of Man, The Four Seasons of the Year, and The Four Monarchies. The number four ran in the family; her father, Governor Dudley, wrote of The Four Parts of the World.

Note 4, page 51.

When the words of the text were written I did not know that Maurice Raynaud had remarked the same thing. “Il est digne de remarque que la médecine humorale est restée celle des gens du people, dont la langage est si souvent ce qu’était deux cents ans auparavant, celui de la science.” Les Médecins au Temps de Molière, 180, note. In 1580 Juan Huarte, a Spanish physician, published Examen de Ingenios para las Sciencias, a work of great popularity which was rendered into many tongues. The English version appeared in 1616 under the title A Triall of Wits. Huarte tried to do what modern phrenology has attempted—to indicate the aptitude of men for different occupations. In chaps. v and vi he explains that all the difference in the character of men’s minds is traceable to heat, dryness, and humidity. Dryness is favorable to understanding, heat to imagination, while moisture is essential to memory, which is therefore strongest in the morning.

Note 5, page 52.

In that strange series of notes which we know as Bacon’s Natural History, the following remedies are mentioned as familiar cathartics and diuretics of that time: colquintidæ, agaric, black hellebore, scammony, antimony, mechoacan, rhubarb, senna, wormwood, myrobalanes, peach-tree bark, medicines of mercury, salt, oxymel, and pepper. Except mechoacan, peach-tree bark, and perhaps wormwood, all these remedies were known to the Arabians, and all the rest except senna, myrobalanes, and oxymel were, I believe, included in the ancient Greek materia medica. Compare Adams’s Paulus Ægineta, vol. iii, passim. Clysters and suppositories are mentioned by Bacon. It would seem that purgatives and their opposites were very important elements of English

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medicine in the seventeenth century. Bacon repeats the jest of a famous Jewish physician, who said that English medical men were “like bishops that have the power of binding and loosing, but no more.” Advancement of Learning, book ii. The use of cathartics to void humors that might send up vapors to the brain, recalls Vaughan’s advice that one should sleep on the right side with the mouth open, and with a hole in the nightcap at the top. Fifteen Directions for Health, p. 13, 1602, Early English Text Society.

Note 6, page 53.

Barrough’s The Method of Phisicke directs in certain cases to draw blood out of the middle vein of the forehead, and in another case “you must cut the liuer veine on the arme.” Third edition, 1601, pp. 45 and 46. I have also a copy of the seventh edition of this popular manual dated 1634. Its general use in America was probably matched by its authority in England. There is a round denunciation of the practice of venesection by an anti-Galenist in Thomson on the Plague, 1666, pp. 50 and 51. Venesection was not nearly so common in England as in France. In the Historical MSS. Commission, Eleventh Report, Appendix, part v, p. 7, is a letter from Prince Rupert: “I am in noe small paine for our cosin since I heare she hath gott the small poxe. Pray God shee falle not into the Frenchifyed physician’s hands, see lett blode and dye.”

Note 7, Page 55.

That the doctrine of signatures is more ancient than Paracelsus I have no doubt. The treatise De Dynamdiis, usually enumerated among the works of Galen, and sometimes ascribed to Gariopontus, of the famous medical school of Salerno (a professed compiler from Galen), deduces the therapeutic virtue of substances from color, form, or other characteristics. Œuvres de Ambroise Pare, Introduction par Malgaigne, xxi. Compare also Henderson’s School of Salernum, ii. But the editor of Sydenham Society’s edition of Paulus Ægineta has in part anticipated this remark, for he says that he has “detected a few traces of the singular doctrine of signatures, so-called, in the works of ancient authorities,” iii, 16. Major J. W. Powell, Director of the Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution, tells me that the doctrine of curing by likes is a part of the medical theory of every tribe of American Indians, as it is very curiously of Chinese medicine. The conclusion is not a violent one that it is an element of primitive medicine generally. It was elaborated into an element of philosophy in the later middle ages. Basilius Valentinus,

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whose Triumph Wagen Antimonii, written about 1500 a.d. , appears to have furnished Paracelsus with many germs of theory, pretends that a spider being poisonous can not get away if surrounded by a circle of unicorn’s horn which was an ideal antidote to poison. But if any poisonous substance were added to the circle, the spell was broken and the spider escaped. Bread, on the other hand, was strongly attracted by unicorn’s horn, both being free from poison, pp. 66 and 67, original edition, 1624. His general principle is stated mystically—“Simile simili gaudet.” Paracelsus probably derives from this his dictum “of likes with likes, not contraries against contraries” (”Ex qua recepta sibi proponuntur similium cum similibus non contrariorum ad contraria”), and he adds, “Salt therefore wishes to have its Salt, Mercury its Mercury, and Sulphur its Sulphur”—salt, mercury, and sulphur being the three principal elements in mystic philosophy. Paracelsus, De Cutis Apertionibus, chap. vii, p. 62. Compare Otto Tachenius, His Davis, p. 2, and see the doctrine of the sympathy of similars stated with a ludicrous mimicry of logic by a learned Galenist, Maranta, in his De Theriaca, liber i, caput iii (1576). Adams, in his edition of the works of Hippocrates, i, 75 ff., on the treatise anciently ascribed to Hippocrates and belonging to his period, On the Places in Man, says: “And he further makes the important remark that, although the general rule of treatment be ‘contraria contrariis curantur,’ the opposite rule also holds good in some cases, namely, ’Similia similibus curantur.’” Basilius Valentinus, p. 68, recognizes both methods as though this passage were before him, and Paracelsus appears to be denying the first half of it in the extract given above. It is not possible to separate this doctrine of curing by likes from the doctrine of signatures with which it was entangled. One of the best statements of this is to be found in the Magia Natural of Ciencia de Filosofia Secreta, a very intelligent work by Castrillo, a Spanish Jesuit, which bears date 1649. He says that many “modern philosophers” have pretended to find in external forms indications of the occult qualities of things. Plants that show any resemblance to the human head are good for cephalic troubles, as are animals whose heads are remarkable in shape, such as the elephant, the beaver, and others. Animals with eyes notable in any way are remedies for the ills of that organ, and he instances among others the turtle that in dying was believed to shut one eye and open the other, and mentions a stone that showed a pupil within a circle which rendered the vision acute if held in

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the hand. The whole passage is interesting. Folios 16 and 17. The cure by similitudes is found in the treatment by amulets, and in that form is probably older than in medicine. There seems to be a trace of this mode of thinking in the ancient legend of Telephus, which has served so many poets, including Dante and Chaucer, and which gave anciently the name “telephean” to incurable ulcers. Wounded by Achilles, Telephus could be healed only by rust from the spear that inflicted the injury. A suggestion of the same feeling among the Semitic nations is perhaps to be found in the brazen serpent of Moses, and in the offering of the Philistines, 1 Samuel, vi.

Note 8, page 55.

From the English version of Jacob Behmen’s De Signatura Rerum I quote the following: “Every root as it is in the Earth may be known by the signature for what it is good and profitable, . . . and it is discerned in the leaves and stalk which Planet is Lord in the Property, much more in the Flower: for of what taste the Herb and Root is, even such an Hunger is in it. and such a cure lies therein, for it has such a Salt.” Compare the term sulphur applied to rosin: “wetchs des Baums Sulphur ist.” Triumph Wagen, 230. There was a passion for the mystical and esoteric in science at the end of the middle ages. “Medicine,” says Paracelsus, “is not otherwise a science than this that the will of God may be secret and secret may be the will of God,” De Naturalibus Rebus, chap. v. Among the manuscripts in my collection is a very clever alchemical Poeme Sur l’elixir Royal in a handwriting of the late seventeenth century. In this, Nature, exhorting the poet to speak of the forces by which Heaven has extracted light from metals, enjoins him to speak esoterically “like a philosopher”:

Note 9, page 57.

Bacon recommended the entrails and skin of a wolf for colic. A case recently occurred in the suburbs of New York city in which a mother administered boiled mice to cure a child of nervous timidity—no doubt a survival of some old English prescription based on “curing by the assimulate.” Salmon, in his English Physician, 1693, p. 309, says, “The Flesh and the Liver of a Mad Dog dryed and beaten into Pouder are said to cure the biting of a Mad Dog.” He prescribes the spleen of an ox for diseases

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of that organ, and the lungs of a fox for pulmonary diseases. The list of such remedies might be multiplied. In popular medicine yellow dock is still used for jaundice. In 1708 Lady Otway gives two recipes for curing jaundice made up mostly of yellow substances. In the one she put lemon, turmeric, and saffron; the other consisted of “20 head-lice mixed with nutmeg and sugar and powder of turmerick.” Royal Historical MSS. Commission, Tenth Report, Appendix, part iv, 352.

Note 10, page 58.

Stafford appears to claim this as his own nostrum, but the process is given in Paracelsus, who no doubt found it in Basil Valentine, who differs from Stafford in the number of toads. One live poisonous toad-ein lebendige gifftige Kröte—is his prescription. The toad was dried in the sun and burned in a closed kettle, after which it was pulverized. He explains that calcination brought out the inner power or poison of the toad, which being applied, “like its like,” drew out, Basil calls it a magnetic cure. Triumph Wagen, edition 1624, 71. See the allusions to this preparation in Emanuel König, Regnum Animale, 1683, 139, where various authorities are cited, and where a mode of preparing the toad for an amulet-nobilissimum amuletum-is given, following Paracelsus and the Basilica Chymica. On the medical uses to which the toad was applied in England compare History of Animals and Minerals, by Robert Lovell, Oxford, 1661, and Salmon’s English Physician, 1693. As an antidote to its own poison the red toad was used anciently. See the authorities cited in Adams’s Paulus Ægineta, ii, 207.

Note 11, page 59.

It must have been unfortunate to have a prescription of such value in controversy, but the authorities are not agreed as to its ingredients. Moss from the skull of a dead man, aeri derelicta, was, however, a permanent element. Bacon gives some account of one prescription in his Natural History, section 998. But John Baptist Porta has the prescription given by Paracelsus to the Emperor Maximilian, and received through a courtier by Porta. I give it in English: Two ounces of skull moss, as above; of human flesh, the same; of mummy (a liquor reported to be distilled from dead bodies) and of human blood, each half an ounce; of linseed oil, turpentine, and Armenian bole, each one ounce-pound all together in mortar. Porta’s Magia Naturalis, liber viii, caput xii. According to Porta, the weapon was left lying in the ointment. In the text I have followed a different prescription given in Bacon’s Natural History. In the selection of ingredients

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for this preparation the mystical doctrine of curing by similitude is manifest.

Note 12, page 59.

“The operation of this ointment,” says the author of a famous pharmacopœia, in 1641, “is by the identity or sameness of the Balsamick spirit, which is the same in a Man and his Blood; for there is no difference but this, in a Man the Spirit actually lives, but in the Blood it is coagulated.” Shröder, quoted by Salmon, English Physician, vii, 64. See also Sir Kenelm Digby’s Sympathetic Powder generally, and a theory of the action of this powder, or “Zaphyrian Salt,” in Howell’s Familiar Letters. Jacob’s edition, 645. An account of the cure of Howell by this remedy is in supplement ii, 673, 674, and in Digby’s A Late Discourse touching the Cure of Wounds by the Powder of Sympathy, 6-11. The sympathetic powder was used for all hæmorrhages and even for other diseases, according to Sprengel. Compare Sir K. Digby on the cure of swelled feet in oxen, Discourse on Sympathetic Powder, 129-132. In the time of their greatest vogue these cures were probably never sanctioned by the strict Galenists. The subject was discussed before the Royal Society in its infancy in a paper intituled Relations of Sympathetic Cures and Trials. Sprat, 199.

Note 13, page 60.

Ambrose Paré, the famous surgeon, had the wholesome scientific skepticism which was wanting in Lord Bacon and most other philosophers of the time. He denounced the weapon ointment as imposture. “Neither if any should let me see the truth of such juggling by the events themselves and my own eyes, would I therefore believe that it were done naturally and by reason, but rather by charms and Magick.” Paré’s works, old English version, 39. Paré also refused mummy, not knowing what it was made of. Compare the debate in the Glasgow Synod over the curative power of the famous Lee penny. Mitchell’s Past in the Present, 159.

Note 14, page 60.

Queen Elizabeth’s ambassador to the French court in 1596 was attended in his illness by Lorrayne, a physician of the famous faculty of Montpellier, and another. “They gave him Confectio Alcarmas compounded of musk, amber, gold, pearl, and unicorn’s horn,” ingredients whose virtues seem to have been deduced from their rarity and costliness. The confectio alkermes, an Arabic remedy, varied in its ingredients. The amber was ambergris. See the formula in the Amsterdam Pharmacopœia of 1636, p. 61, and that in the London Dispensatory as quoted and

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discussed in Culpepper’s Physitian’s Library, 1675. The Arabic form of the confection appears to have been less complicated. In the well-known pharmaceutical work of Mesue the younger—John son of Mesue, son of Mech, son of Hely, son of Abdella, King of Damascus—the ingredients in this “confectione alkermes” are fewer, and there are no pearls or ambergris. The costly elements are “good gold,” “good musk,” and lapis lazuli. My copy of this work is called Mesue Vulgate, perhaps because it is in Italian. It bears date Venice, 1493, and must have been one of the earliest of printed medical works. See K. Sprengel, vol. ii, 361-364, on Mesue the younger. On the tendency to expensive remedies, compare Howell’s Familiar Letters, 45. “More operativ then Bezar, of more virtue then Potable Gold or the Elixir of Amber.” In Molière’s Médecin Malgré Lui, acte iii, scene 2, Sganarelle speaks of a medical preparation: “Oui, c’est un fromage préparé, où il entre de l’or, du corail, et des perles, et quantité des autres choses précieuses.” An English confection described by Bassompierre may have been the confectio alkermes spoken of above: “A pie of ambergrease magesterial, of pearl, musk,” etc. Bassompierre’s Embassy, 36. The bezoardick powder magisterial of the London Dispensatory contained sapphire, ruby, jacinth, emerald, pearls, unicorn’s horn, Oriental and American bezoar, musk, ambergris, bone of a stag’s heart, kermes, and sixteen other ingredients. “I am afraid to look upon it,” says Culpepper. “’Tis a great cordial to revive the Body, but it will bring the purse into a consumption.”

The application of a fowl freshly cut open, to cure erysipelas and other diseases, has been practiced in the valley of the Ohio and probably elsewhere within memory. Lorrayne, of the famous faculty of Montpellier. in his treatment of the English ambassador referred to above, made use of “pigeons applied to his side, and all other means that art could devise sufficient to expel the strongest poison and he be not bewicht withal.” MSS. at Hatneid House, vi, 112. Manuscripts Commission. “I never heard of but one person bitten in Pennsylvania and New Jersey with the Rattlesnake,” says Budd, “and he was helpt of it by two chickens slit assunder and apply’d to the place, which drew out the Poyson.” Gowan’s edition, p. 71.

Note 15, page 61.

Gold is said by the alchemist to have its origin in the sun. It is calied “the under sun,” and “an earthly sun endowed by God with an incredible potency, for in it are included all vegetable, animal, and mineral virtues.” Potable gold is the “tincture of

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the sun,” and the enthusiastic Glauber talks of “partaking of the fruit of the Sun tree.” Compare Phaedro and Glauber passim. A large volume would not be sufficient to recount all the virtues of this powerful remedy, in Glauber’s opinion. Compare Evelyn’s Diary, i, 271.

Note 16, page 61.

The curious and scientific reader may follow if he can the process for making potable gold, the “True tincture of the Sun,” in the various works of Glauber, or in De Via Universali he may learn to get both potable gold and the philosopher’s stone by “the dry process” or by “the wet process.” He may get directions for making the tincture in Glauber’s De Auri Tinctura sive Auro Potabili, a German work with a Latin title, dated 1652. Or he may read the Panaceæ Hermeticæ seu Medicinæ Universalis of Johann Gerhard, 1640; but he will find the “most secret mode of compounding the Universal Medicine” in the Arcamun Lullianum. There is a rare tractate, Vom Stein der Weisen, written in the middle of the sixteenth century, by Phaedro von Rodach. These and others are before me, but, after some wearying of the mind with esoteric phrases in a compound of old German and Latin, I prefer to leave the question of the actual constitution of the most potent universal remedy to special investigators. Fonssagrives, in the Dictionnaire Encyclopédique des Sciences Médicales, under the word “Or,” says that a preparation of mercury and chloride of gold constituted the so-called potable gold of the seventeenth century—I do not know on what authority. I am in some doubt whether, after all the complicated hugger-mugger, the alchemists got any gold in their final decoctions. According to Phaedra, it was not so much gold they sought as the subtile spirit of gold that freed men and metals from impurities. Glauber, in his De Auri Tinctura, 1652, took pains to explain how the true could be known from the false and sophisticated potable gold, some of which was nothing but colored water, p. 24. Angelus Sala, though of the Paracelsian school, ridiculed the notion of drinkable gold, and declared that fulminating gold (knallgold) was the only preparation of that metal that had ever been made. Sprengel, Geschichte der Arzneikunde, iv, 557. It has been conjectured that some of the so-called potable gold offered for sale was merely a preparation of mercury. The two metals were allied, in the fancy of the time. In the Ehralter Ritterkrieg Gold calls Mercury “Mein Bruder Mercurio,” and yet says that mercury was the female and gold the male. Salmon’s English Physician, p. 10, has two recipes for making tincture of gold, one

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with, the other without mercury. More than one writer intimates that there is as much gold left after the liquid essence is drawn off. “Aurum decoctione non atteritur,” says Lemnius. But the mere looking at gold coins or at rings, especially if adorned with “stones and lovely gems,” recreated the eyes and heart, and a man might be brought to himself when in a collapse by applying gold and saffron to the region of the heart with the third finger of the left hand. Lemnius, Occvltis Naturae Miraculis, 309, 310.

Note 17, page 61.

An English manuscript in my possession in the handwriting of the seventeenth century gives many directions for alchemical processes to attain the “quintessence” so much sought. Some of these had to be conducted in the earth. Under the title The Essence of wine whereby to Dissolue Gold this occurs: “To the Essence of wine twice circulated (as is elsewhere taught), add Gold & Sett it in digestion in Sand wth a Lamp For 3 months & yu shall finde the Gold dissolued but not irreducibly, never the lesse a quarter of a Spoonfull given at a time to a dying man, tho he be insensible, it will restore him half an hour to perfect sence, as ever he was in all his life.”

Note 18, page 62.

The library of Winthrop the younger consisted of more than a thousand volumes. The fraction of it now in the Society Library in New York is less than half. Among these is Hercules Chymicus sive Aurum Potabile, 1641, and Traicte de la Vraye Unique Grand et Universelle Médecine des Anciens, dite des Recens, Or Potabile, t633. There was also Glauber’s Latin Treatise of 1658 on Potable Gold. These were new books. The revival of interest in potable gold in the seventeenth century awakened opposition. Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, says: “Some take it upon them to cure all maladies by one medicine severally applyed, as that Panacea, Aurum potabile, so much controverted in these days.” In 1403 an English statute had been passed making it felony to “use any craft of multiplication” to increase the quantity of gold and silver. Statutes at Large, ii, 448. Robert Boyle, in the seventeenth century, in spite of his having written The Sceptical Chemist, thought he had discovered the forgotten secret of the fifteenth century, but he did not print his discovery. Sir Isaac Newton wrote to the Royal Society in praise of Boyle’s reticence, fearing that the full disclosure of what the hermetics knew was “not to be communicated without immense damage to the world.” In 1689, however. Boyle secured the repeal of the statute forbidding the making of gold. Thus did the dark

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shadow of mediæval credulity still fall upon the most enlightened minds. Compare Chalmer’s Dictionary of Biography, vi, 348, 349.

Note 19, page 64.

The multitudinousness of ancient compounds was perhaps a trait derived from primitive medicine. The Iroquois had a sort of theriac, a cure for all bodily injuries, made from the dried and pulverized skin of every known bird; beast, and fish. Erminnie A. Smith, in Power’s Second Bureau of Ethnology Report, 73.

Note 20, page 65.

“In that country [Java] but very seldome there grows a Stone in the Stomach of a Porkapine, called Pedro Porco: of whose virtue there are large discriptions: and the Hollanders are now so fond that I have seen 400 dollars of 8/8 given for one no bigger than a Pidgeon’s Egg. There is sophistication as well in that as in the Bezoar, Musk, &c., and every day new falsehood.” Sir P. Vernatti, in Sprat’s Royal Society, 171. There was exhibited in the University of Leyden “the horne of a goat in whosse ventrikle the bezar stone is found.” Marmaduke Rawdon, Camden Society, 105. Compare the accounts in Monardes and Acosta and the discussion in Castrillo’s Magia Natural, last chapter. Castrillo calls the bezoar “Regna de los Venenos,” and says that it cured pestiferous fevers and other diseases caused by melancholy humors, Joannes Juvenis, in his essay De Medicamentis Bezoardicis, published in Antwerp in the latter part of the sixteenth century, treats the bezoar very mystically. A disease of an occult and divine origin—divinus et Secretus morbus—like the plague, exacts a medicine of a heavenly and concealed faculty, and, as he said, with a blind and hidden potency. The plague, he says, “is a mysterious disease of the heart caught by inhalation from poison dispersed in the air by a malign conjunction of the planets.” It requires a bezoardic remedy. Under this head he includes alexipharmical mixtures and remedies whose supposed virtues have no rational basis, as well as amulets. He describes an amulet of gold, silver, and arsenic made into the shape of a heart and worn next that organ by Pope Adrian, and he recommends the wearing of six precious stones and some brilliant pearls in finger rings or about the neck. They are to be frequently looked on, for in them resides “the hidden bezoar” against all poisons and the plague. There is here the sense of alexipharmical in the word bezoar. Compare the citations of Adams in Paulus Ægineta, iii, 247. Beguin’s Élémens de Chymie, edited by Lucas de Roy, 1632, describes seven kinds of “bezoart”—to wit, mineral, solar, lunar, martial, jovial, metallic,

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and solar of Harthmannus. None of these have anything to do with the bezoar stone. Paré says that it is called by the Arabians bedezabar. But he quotes Garcias ab Horto as saying that the goat is called pazain, wherefore the stone should be called pazar. Pate’s (Parey’s) works in English, book xxi, chap. xxxvi.

Note 21, page 66.

The colonists were cut off by distance from that most potent remedy for king’s evil, the royal touch, by which thousands of English people were healed, and the administration of which the Church of England sanctioned by a form of prayer. See in Sparrow’s Collection, 1671. In 1684 six or seven people were literally crushed to death in the mad eagerness of the crowd to secure the blessing of the royal touch. Evelyn’s Diary, 571. It is remarked by Aubrey with his wonted innocency that “whether our kings were of the house of York or Lancaster” the touch “did the cure (i. e.) for the most part.” Worse than all, in the time of Monmouth’s rebellion, the illegitimate touch of the pretender cured some of his believing partisans. Castrillo, the Spanish Jesuit, declared in 1649 that the intercessions of Joseph of Arimathea, the first missionary to England, had secured to its monarchs “el cura de la gota.” The Spanish kings, on the other hand, had the gift of exorcism. “Los reges de Espana tienen gracia de ahuyentor demonios por auer sus antecessores professado la propagacion de la Fé,” etc. Magia Natural, folio 81. The miraculous touch of the English kings was believed to date from the Confessor. The touch of a seventh son—“a seventh son and no daughter between, and in pure wedlock”—was almost as good as the king’s perhaps. Aubrey’s Miscellanies, fourth edition, 124, 125. Seventh sons were to be reached in America sometimes. Faith in the virtue of their touch is not yet quite extinct in America or in England. Compare Diary of Walter Yonge, 13, note. In 1688 a man afflicted with ulcers petitioned the Governor of Massachusetts to give him a brief to solicit money in Massachusetts to defray the expense of a trip to England to crave the royal touch. Green’s Medicine in Massachusetts, 48.

Note 22, page 68.

I am indebted to Miss S. F. Price, the well-known botanist of Bowling Green, Ky., for technical information regarding dittany. The authorities on dittany are too numerous for citation. Virgil perpetuated the memory of the wild goats of Candia, and old medical books continued to refer to them. See Paré’s works in English, 1600, p. 41.

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Note 23, page 63.

As early as 1568 André Thevet’s New found World or Antarctike appeared in an English version. Although quite vague, and on many accounts untrustworthy, it probably awakened curiosity regarding the medicinal value of American plants. The far more significant and much-esteemed work of Monardes, a Spanish physician, was probably read in England on its first appearance in Spanish in 1565. Fourteen years later, in 1577, the first English edition was issued, and its influence can be traced in the account which Harlot gave of Virginia in De Bry. Through Monardes the English public first became familiar with the extraordinary medicinal virtues attributed to tobacco, and in his pages sarsaparilla and sassafras, strongholds of quackery to this day, were first made known to a public that soon became enamored of two plants which had the virtue of innocuousness. In the estimation of Monardes the “leaves, plants, herbs, roots, blossoms, gums, fruits, seeds, liquors, and stones of great medicinal virtues” which had come from America were of as much greater value than all other wealth of the New World as “bodily health is worth more than temporal good.” First Spanish edition, 1565, p. 3.

Note 24, page 69.

Books of reference and most writers on Virginia confound John Clayton, author of various papers in the Transactions of the Royal Society, with Clayton the botanist, whose observations in the eighteenth century supplied the foundation for the Flora Virginica of Gronovius. A writer in the National Dictionary of Biography, with bibliographical detail, ascribes all the writings of John Clayton, the seventeenth century clergyman, to John Clayton the botanist in the eighteenth century, making the latter the precocious author of papers published five years before the date of his birth as given in the same work. John Clayton, the parson, was also the author of a posthumous paper in volume xli of the Transactions of the Royal Society. Neill calls him “the parson of Jamestown,” but, so far as I know, without any authority.

Note 25, page 71.

I am unable to identify the little creatures found on oak leaves which proved a remedy in some diseases when worn about the neck in taffetie bags by New England women. Josselyn’s Two Voyages, 63. Increase Mather gives a popular cure for ague in New England, aimed at its periodicity. Five pieces of bread having letters written on them were given into the custody of the patient, who was to write in succession on one of these

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each day the word kalend (ant) for five days. Toothache was cured in Boston by giving a sealed piece of paper on which was written, “In nomine Patris, Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, preserve thy servant,” etc. Illustrious Providences, 185. In Queen Elizabeth’s time there was a curious remedy, which is alluded to as follows:

Note 26, page 72.

A belief in the value of perfumes for sickness, and especially for the plague, prevailed in Elizabeth’s reign. See Bullein’s Dialogue against the Fever Pestilence, passim, and the remark of Mulcaster on perfumes: “It is wonderful that is written and strange that we see, what is wrought thereby in nature of Physick, for the remedying of some desperate diseases.” Positions, 37. I have not chanced to note anything of the sort in the seventeenth century writers, whose nostrums were far from sweet-smelling.

Note 27, page 72.

The curious reader may consult on the use of animal substances the regular pharmacopœias of the time. See also such works as Emanuel König’s Regnum Animale, and in particular his chapter De Insectorum in Medecina utilitatibus. Culpepper’s Commentary on the London Dispensatory, 1675, contains lists of these animal substances in undisguised English. Cotton Mather said of Wait Winthrop, the third of the family to practice medicine on his neighbors, that he turned nearly all Nature to medicine:

Note 28, page 73.

Clayton, in the Transactions of the Royal Society for 1687, xli, 149, describes the Indian method of curing wounds by sucking them and then using the mouth as a syringe to inject a biting decoction. Instead of cupping, the savages cauterized with lighted punk.

Note 29, page 74.

The practice of surgeons was not held in high esteem in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. John Halle, in the preface to Lanfranke’s Chirurgerie, 1565, says: “Whereas there is one Chirurgien that was apprentice to his arte, or one phisicien that hath trauayled in the true Studie and Exercise of Phisique, there are tenne that are presumptious Swearers, Smaterers, or Abusers of the same, yea, Smythes, Cutlers, Carters, Coblers, Copers, Coriars of lether, Carpenters, and a great rable of women, which forsake their handle Craftes and for filthy lucre

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abuse Phisick and Chirurgerie.” After lauding the medical profession, Peacham says: “I here intend no common Chirurgians, Mountebanks, unlettered Empericks, and women-Doctors . . . whose practice is infamous, Mechanick, and base.” Compleat Gentleman, 11. See in Malgaine’s Introduction to Paré’s works, pp. 124 and 138 ff., decrees and ordinances for the regulation of barber-surgeons in the middle ages, with an account of the struggle of the surgeons to abase the barbers. In England matters had come to such a pass in the sixteenth century that Sir H. Gilbert, in his Queen Elizabeth’s Achademy, says that “Chirurgie is not now to be learned in any other place then in a Barbors Shoppe.” To the practice of barbers, and surgeons little better, the colonists were usually shut up by circumstances. One early Virginia surgeon was a Dutch bond servant. A library consisting of The Surgeon’s Mate or of Barrough’s Method of Phisicke, rarely of several books, gave the suffering what comfort can be had from quackery that is self-reliant from mere ignorance.

Note 30, page 76.

Crocus Metallorum, the favorite Virginia remedy, was an officinal preparation used in several formulæ by Sydenham at that time. The editor of the works of Sydenham (Sydenham Opera Omnia, 1844) makes it “Antimonii Sesquioxyd cum Antimon. Sequisulphur.” It was emetic. See Sydenham’s Epistle I, works in English, ii, 19. It was prepared according to the London Dispensatory by calcining together equal parts of antimony and saltpeter. On the use of sulphuret of antimony by the Jews, Greeks, Romans, and Arabs, see an interesting note in Adams’s Paulus Ægineta, iii, 356. The curious reader may also consult Basil Valentine, p. 37, who makes antimony “one of the seven wonders of the world.” The tract Von den Particular Vnd Vniversal-Tincturen, appended to the Triumph Wagen, Thölden’s issue, 1624, contains a section “De Crocis Metallorum, et eorum Salibus,” written in alchemical style. Venice treacle was the world-famed theriac, which, according to the English formula, contained about sixty-five ingredients, and was given as a universal antidote. Gascoin’s powder was the compound powder of calcined crab’s claws, so called. I do not know what it was, but not literal crab’s claws. Snakeroot is the only American remedy in the list, and this had been accepted in Europe. Evidently the Virginia doctors were old-fashioned, and, according to their slender knowledge, Galenist. Medicines of the other school and simples were perhaps used in domestic and irregular practice.

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Note 31, page 78.

Forsyth’s Antiquary’s Portfolio, i, 36, has the broad statement that in the Heptarchy and to the time of Richard II physic was in the hands of old women and the clergy. It was taught in the nunneries to girls before the Reformation as a womanly accomplishment, ibid., 238. The sense of its appropriateness to women, and the habit of prescription by accomplished women, survived in the seventeenth century and later. Clayton said of the Indians in 1657, “Every one according to his skill is a doctor (as some women are in England),” Transactions of the Royal Society, xli, 143. Tiraboschi, in his Storia della Litteratura Italiana, iii, lib. iv, sect. ii, cites from Odericus Vitalis a passage implying that the most skillful physician in the world-famous school of Salerno in 1059 was a woman. Of Rodolfo he says: “Nella medecina ancora egli era cosi versato, che in Salerno . . . non si trovo chi es uqualiasse fuor di una dotta matrona.” This is supposed to refer to Trotula, some of whose writings have come down to our time. The wording of the decree of 1281 cited in Astruc’s Histoire de la Faculté de Médecine de Montpellier, p. 20, is considered by Malgaigne to imply the habitual practice of medicine by women in the middle ages. In this decree Jacques “defend . . . à toutes personnes tant aux Chrétiens qu’aux Juifs,” to practice without degrees. Compare Malgaigne’s inference from this in his preface to Œuvres d’Ambroise Paré, but Malgaigne’s reference to Astruc and his date are both slightly inaccurate. On the women professors of the school of Salerno, Henderson’s pamphlet on that school and Ordronneaux’s Code of Health of Salerno. As late as 1691 Cotton Mather, in “Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion,” mentions “chirurgery” as an appropriate study for women. It is said that in colonial New Jersey women engrossed a considerable share of the medical art, such as it was. This is no doubt true of all the colonies.

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