NSDAR Program "Colonial Medicines and Cure Alls"

The majority of us are more or less superstitious; we are governed by our emotions and
not by reasoning, allowing little things to govern our everyday life.
Few of us like to sit down with thirteen at the table, we rather begin a task on any day but
Friday, and we dread to spill the salt or break a looking-glass for fear of the seven years bad
luck.

Queen Elizabeth like most people of her time made no secret of her superstitions. To
ward off disease, she wore suspended from her neck, a piece of gold engraved with mystical
characters.

Superstition has always centered about rare stones or gems and birth stones in jewelry are
supposed to bring good luck to the wearers.

The bezoars stone similar to a gall stone, found in the alimentary organ of ruminants, was
highly prized in Europe as an antidote for poison. Gov. Endicott possessed one of these stones
and Gov. John Winthrop sent to the East Indies for one.

In the past, the agate cured spider-bites, stopped headaches and bleeding of wounds. The
beryl, when swallowed, healed quinsy and cured eye disease when pressed to the eyelids. Coral
drove away malaria fever and prevented rabies in a dog, if set in the dog's collar. The diamond
cured malaria and swallowed as a powder was erroneously believed to be a poison. An emerald,
worn from the neck on a cord, warded off convulsions in children; and swallowed, it would cure
dysentery. Jade powder relieved heart burn and jasper would cure heart disease, while the
sapphire was a remedy for snakebite and typhoid fever. The topaz insured a long healthy life,
intelligence and beauty, and pearls dissolved in wine were a remedy for all the remaining ills one
might develop.

There were certain remedies known in the middle of the 16th century such as opium,
castor oil, gentian, aloes, mint, myrrh, caraway, honey, goose-oil, turpentine and sea salt; and we
presume the people in the colonies knew the uses of most of them. However, many disgusting
substances were used as remedies, for example, dung of the gazelle and the crocodile, fat of the
serpent, mammalian entrails.

In colonial days, obstetrics did not receive the attention in this country that it did abroad.
Child birth in the early days of American civilization was considered a simple physiological
process to be carried out in secrecy with a friend or midwife.

The wife of Dr. Samuel Fuller, who landed from the Mayflower, was the first midwife of
the colony. The next was Mrs. Hutchinson of Boston, who was banished for her political heresy.
She was succeeded by Ruth Barnaby who lived to be 101 years of age. The first person to be
executed in the colony of Mass. Bay was Margaret Jones, female physician who was accused of
witch-craft.

From the manuscript of Dr. Zerobabel Endicott of Salem, (son of Gov. Endicott by his
second wife) we read this prescription for relieving painful childbirth---"For Sharpe and Difficult
Travel in Women with child---Take a Lock of Vergins haire on any Part of ye head, of half the
age of ye women in travill out in very small to fine Powder---then take 12 ant's eggs dried in an
oven after ye bread is drawn out other wise make them dry and make them to powder with the
haire, give this with a quarter of a pint of Red Cow's milk, or for want of it give it in strong ale
wort." This concoction was less disgusting than many used at that period.
Cotton Mather used crushed sow-bugs in his practice also crushed body lice and
incinerated toads
.
The sole of an old shoe "worn by some man that walked much"---ground up and taken
internally was a remedy for dysentery.

The medical care and medical education that has made America safer for mothers had its
beginning here in the days of our Revolutionary War. In no war and in no country was there ever
a greater example of patriotism than that of Dr. Joseph Warren of Boston. He dispatched Paul
Revere to arouse the "minute-men", and declined to accept a proffered commission, preferring to
shoulder his musket and take his place in the ranks under Col. Prescott at Bunker Hill. He gave
his life the same day on which he joined in the struggle. His brother, Dr. John Warren was
director of Cambridge, Mass., military Hospital.

There was Dr. Hugh Mercer, who served as Brig. Gen., mortally wounded at the battle of
Princeton and in his last moments attended by Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of five medical men, who
signed the Declaration of Independence.

Then there was Dr. James Thacher of Mass., our first medical biographer, who has left us
one of the best word pictures of personality of George Washington. Also Dr. James Tilton from
Delaware, Dr. Benjamin Church of Boston, Dr. John Morgon of Philadelphia, Dr. William
Shippen, Jr. of Philadelphia, the second in seven generations of American physicians bearing his
name, and Dr. John Cochran.

Thomas Thacher, the first minister of the Old South Church of Boston, wrote the earliest
medical treatise printed in this country.
Smallpox was the first contagious disease which was found preventable, and Boston had
ten to twelve outbreaks before a cure was discovered.

The colonists of New England were brought in contact with smallpox from two sources.
In the early part of the 16th century the Spaniards introduced the disease into Mexico. It spread to
the American Indians, and one half of them are said to have died of it in a short time. Then it
spread to the colonists and in a century six epidemics occurred in Boston. The last of these
started in 1721 and more than one half took the disease. During this epidemic, inoculation was
used in America for the first time. Inoculation, the acquiring of smallpox in a mild form, was
introduced into America by Cotton Mather, son of Increase Mather, one time president of
Harvard.

George Washington had smallpox in 1751 and was an advocate of inoculation and
ordered that all recruits to the Continental Army, who had not already had smallpox, should be
inoculated. Martha Washington also protected herself in this way.

Dr. Edward Jenner, an English physician 1749-1823, perfected vaccination, and Dr.
Benjamin Waterhouse of Boston was the first physician in America to use vaccination as
prevention against smallpox.

Thomas Jefferson was the first president to be vaccinated against smallpox.

Syphilis appeared in the colonies in 1646 in Boston as recorded in the diary of John
Winthrop, and there was a disease called itch caused by the itch-mite, which burrowed under the
skin and caused small itching blisters in the days when there were few or no bath tubs or baths,
but no one thought it the result of uncleanliness at that time.

Sanitation is medicine's greatest contribution to general history and has made the modern
village and city possible and safe.

In the 17th century all sorts of silly remedies and cure-alls were resorted to, and belief in
witch-craft to heal reached its height.

The following are a few of the old remedies and prescriptions:
To prevent tooth decay, eat a whole mouse twice a month.
For colic, take ½ gill good corn brandy, fill a pipe full of tobacco, soak in brandy,
then drink the brandy.
To make children's teeth grow without pain, boil the brain of a hare and rub the
gums of the children with it and the teeth will grow without pain.
To drive away warts, roast chickens feet and rub the warts with them; then bury
the chicken’s feet under the leaves.

The old mustard plaster still holds its own. Likewise does the combination of rhubarb and
soda, which is now put up according to doctor's prescriptions for sufferers from digestive ills.
Then there was the good old sassafras tea to build up one's blood in the spring. Chamomile tea
was a good stomach tonic for convalescents. Tansy, senna and pennyroyal are still used as
remedies for the various ills they are supposed to cure. Aconite tea was an old favorite in fever
cases. Saffron tea was credited with "bringing out" measles and chickenpox, while sage tea was
reputed to be able to help the air preserved its color.

One of the queerest doses of the early settlers was "snail water." The recipe for this
"water", which is one of early New England's greatest curiosities, follows: "Take a peck of
garden shell snails and put them in an oven till they have done making noise, then take them out
wipe from them the green froth that is upon them, and bruise them, shells and all, in a stone
mortar.---Then lay in the bottom of the distilling pot, angelica (two handfuls), and two handfuls
of celandine upon them, to which put two quarts of rosemary flowers, bearsfoot, agrimony, red
dock roots, bark of barberries, betony wood, sorrel, of each two handfuls, rue one handful; then
pour-over them three gallons of the strongest ale, and let it stand all night; in the morning put in
three ounces of cloves, beaten, six pennyworth of beaten saffron and on top of them six ounces
of shaved hartshorne; then set on the limbeck and receive the water by pints, which will be nine.
Take two teaspoonfuls in four spoonfuls of small beer in the morning, the like in the afternoon."
This concoction was given to children internally as tonic and was used on them as a lotion for
rickets.

A remedy for a case of Dysentery taken from a medical book "The Practice of Physick"
published by Peter Cole in Leaden Hall, September 2, 1657, London, gives the following
observation. "A Dysentery." "A young man 20 yrs. of age, born about the end of August 1643
was troubled with a dysentery 12 daies together; which he took no medicine for, until being
brought into the hospital, he took by order of the Physician thereof, one dram of Salt of viteriel,
dissolved in water. He vomited much flegmatick and cholerick matter, and so the humor flowing
into his guts was revelled, and he, cured by this only medicarment."

V. G. Cramer
Notes from: "The Lame, the Halt and the Blind"
"The Pathfinder."
H.W. Haggard, M.D.