Ms. Doherty good evening. Welcome to this wonderful program. As most of us, all of you know, each year, the partnership has a themed series of events after september 7. September 7 is the day on which boston, dorchester, and watertown were named, and we always commemorate date. We have themed series of events each year. This years theme is that medicine and mortality. Im here to tell you it is the most successful charter day we have ever had. How many of you have been to other events this year . Would you raise your hand . That is what i thought. This is a wonderful. Excellent. In addition to our fall activities, we have lectures, we have Reading Group discussions, and tours from april through november. We are an allvolunteer group that cares passionately about telling the forgotten history of boston between 1630 and the revolution. We do have three more programs coming up. We will be rescheduling the anticipated talk at the old statehouse by dr. David jones. It will be a wonderful closing to this whole theme, and we will also have two more tours. We talk a lot about the renaissance man. We usually really do mean a man. But tonight, you are going to meet a renaissance woman. The depth and breadth of what lori lyn price does from science to history is amazing. First, her day job. She is a master degree in statistics from the ohio state university. She had a faculty appointment at the Tufts University school of medicine. She is a biostatistician at Tufts Medical Center and is named as coauthor and 130 published medical research papers. Then we have the rest of her life, which includes work with the partnership of historic boston, and she just a earned a master of liberal arts in history from the harvard extension school. Her work focused on domestic medicine in 17thcentury england. She really is the expert on this area. She is also a professional historian and genealogical speaker, and she owns bridgingthepast. Com a wonderful site that helps people connect with their ancestors. She is going to help us reach a 17thcentury bostonians and how they coped with illness tonight. Please welcome dr. Lori lyn price. [applause] prof. Price thank you very much for having me here. I am delighted to be here. I hope you can hear me. I am a little bit hoarse with a cough, but i am delighted to be here. Some of you had a chance to go and visit the garden. Part of the reason we are speaking here is because of the association with the 18thcentury garden, and if you had not had a chance to visit, i invite you to visit. The reason we had it at Old North Church is because when we are talking about herbal medicine, which is mostly what the wife would do, but the husband would also get involved we are relying heavily , on gardens. They were not entirely herbal based. They had other things they used as well. Today, we are going to go on a tour of what was used in the homes. Not necessarily by the housewife, although we will be talking a lot about her, but what was used in the home in 17thcentury boston or 17thcentury new england. I will rely heavily on recipe books, or as they called them back then receipt books. Back then they were all the rage. It was cool to collect them from all your friends, doctors, many that may have had the name like the king. In may or may not have come from mccain, but it had his name in it. They thought it would work better than what you got from your friend or neighbor. But we know is from these recipe books. As rose said, my research is mostly in england, but it wouldve been very similar here in new england. So much of what i say will apply to both places. I am going to talk about two recipe books and particular. I will introduce you to them. The first is the Charles Brigham account book. Even though it has a mans name, he wrote his name in it, he maybe wrote two pages of accounts. The rest of the 200 or so pages are written by women, which is probably typical. It has a mans name that what is written by a woman. The ones i use for my thesis were collected by a woman in england or she started in 1650. She died in 1688, she was collecting recipes almost until she died because there was a recipe and there from a book published in 1687, one year before she died. There were actually 450 recipes, but the book was in pretty poor shape when it was donated in the 1970s. So, she also collected culinary recipes, which i did not focus on, because any recipe book would have both the medical and culinary recipes. Many times they would be interspersed together. She had them separated. And then, after she died, somehow the book made its way over here and came into the brigham family. Three generations of women then added further recipes. I will get to those eventually but not today. I did not transcribe them yet. I am in the process of transcribing the entire book. So, that is where the bulk of the recipe books come from. The other recipes, many of the other recipes come from the Martha Washington cookbook. Have any of you heard from this cookbook . You have. Excellent. This cookbook was not Martha Washingtons. Point, butt at some by the time she owned it, it was likely a family heirloom. It was written generations earlier, and like many recipe books passed down, passed down through the generations. I should add that both of these books are manuscript books. The Charles Brigham book i am in the process of transcribing, but it is not published anywhere and karen has published an annotated addition of the Martha Washington cookbook. Those are the books we will use. Lets get into it. I know many of you cannot read these lives, but i will cover the slides and detail, and they in detail, and they will be available, and they will be available in cspan later. This is a recipe from the brigham account book. It is for coffee or consumption. It could mean any respiratory illness. Some of the ingredients are strong stale ale, aquanity, ellecampane roots, loaf sugar, and if you find you are still feeling sick, you can have another before dinner. The housewife, her husband, the trained doctor, the midwife, all of them understood at the same way, and this with the foundation of what they believed. They believed there were four elements in the body, and in terms of what im going to focus on, they had hot, cold, wet, and dry. So you will hear a lot about hot, cold, wet, dry. Every one of us will have a unique combination of what was our ideal balance. It might be different between us , but for my body, if i was in the ideal balance of these four i would be healthy. If any of the humors were out of balance, i would be sick. I would have symptoms, headache, fever, all kinds of things that would indicate my humors were out of balance. They did not believe in this time in distinct illnesses. It is not like i had a specific fever or migraine. I just had a symptom of humors being out of balance. You and i might happen to have the same symptoms, but we may have different treatments because our humors might be out of balance in different ways. There was not a given, said set disease. This is called hormonal theory or galenic medicine. This idea was codified in the second century in the common era. It is called galenic medicine after him. What could cause an imbalance of the humors . It could be a simple chill, an emotional upset, poorly digested milk, my asthma or the bad air, an unbalanced diet, or a change in activity level. You could become much more active or less active, which could create an imbalance in the humors. Sin could also lead to an imbalance in the humors. They did understand diseases were contagious, and so they did not understand that bugs or germs were being passed. But if you were in contact with someone who is sick, that would be just enough to perturb your own humors. And therefore you would then get sick with perhaps the same symptoms. Perhaps not. In terms of diet, today we are familiar with myplate. Gov, which has the ideal balance of meat between fruits and vegetables, grains and meat and dairy, back then it would look like this, which was hot and cold and wet and dry. I told you you would be hearing that a lot. It might not be 100 equal proportions, but it might be 25 of each, but you would certainly want to have elements of each of these if you are already healthy and wanted to maintain your health. If you are already healthy, you wanted food that had a mix of hot and cold and wet and dry properties. If you are not in balance, if you had too many hot humors, he then you would try to eat some cold. How did they know which food had which properties . It was something you would learn growing up. Your mother would teach you if you were a woman, if you were a girl, and the men would probably pick it up along the way as well. If you did not know, there were all kinds of resources you could go to, which i will tell you about in a moment. In new england, one might be fish. Fish is cold and wet. If you were to have fish, you would have to with onion sauce because it is hot and dry. You had your balanced meal of cold and wet fish. Garlic was also hot and dry. Lemon cucumbers were cold and wet. Beef, legumes, and bread were cold and dry. There were books telling you about the varying degrees of heat or cold. It can be firstdegree or third degree. You could really get into this if you wanted to. Many of you saw the garden out back. The 18thcentury garden. Here are a few 17thcentury gardens. This is the whipple house in ipswich, which is wonderful. This is part of the garden. I could not fit the entire picture on the slide in a way that you could see anything. When you go there, you will notice it is marked, heres the mint, here is the thyme. They would not have had it marked, they just wouldve known. They would have grown culinary items, medicinal items, which often one in the same, but some were purely culinary or purely medicinal. They also grew things that would help with dyeing materials. They have many different gardens from different times here. This is Strawberry Bank from up in New Hampshire. If you have not been there, i suggest you go there as well. This is only the top half of the garden. The other half is, i could not take the other half of the picture. Now, if i was a woman starting out in my own household, i was now in charge of taking care of my husbands and kids to come, hopefully my mother would have trained me well, but i also would have had a lot of other resources. One of which is recipe books. This one is from the Wellcome Library in london. They have a wonderful collection of manuscript books. Many of which you can look at it for free, some you have to purchase. There are similar collections in the united states, not nearly as good. That is one of my next steps is to start collecting some of the manuscript books that might have some u. S. Specific recipes to if you were lucky, you would have a recipe book. With the Charles Brigham book, whoever donated it to the Antiquarian Society in the 1970s, they put this wonderful note which is not true but still a nice thought, that hannah was getting married and going to marlborough in 1710, out into the wilderness in the middle of nowhere and so her mother was worried about her and made this recipe book. Entirely not true. Because the recipe book began, most of it was compiled already by 1688, but somehow she ended up it could have been that her mother gave her the recipe book that had already been compiled and then it was passed down through several generations of the family and added to every time. You could, and also, not only a dutch if you did not have your own recipe book, as i mentioned making recipe books was all the , rage so you could start asking your friends, family, doctors, midwives, whoever might have good recipes, you could ask them to start your own collection. A lot of people did that. Also there were also published , books. This is gerards herbal. How many of you are familiar with this book . You should become familiar with it. A couple of you are. It is a wonderful book published first in the late 1500s and kept in print to the 1600s. You can see on the front there are some wonderful drawings. The version i have is black and white so i think all of the versions are black and white, but still, he has some really nice drawings of the plants and along with them he has descriptions of where you can find them, what they look like, what you can use them for. We are going to look at foxglove. This is actually in the garden. One of the gardeners here took the picture and shared it with me. I am going to read you what gerard has to say. I will not read the whole thing because the description is quite long. He says, foxglove with a purple flower is most common. The leaves are long. It goes on for another couple of paragraphs. But then it talks about where you can find it. It says foxglove grows and baron, sandy grounds and under , hedges almost everywhere. Remember, this is in england. This is where you can find it in england. They flourish and flour in june and july. French gives the name in but im going to attempt. And then the temperature the hot , and dry properties. He says the foxglove in that they are bitter are hot and dry. With a certain kind of cleansing quality joined their web. Yet, are they of no use . Any place in medicine according to the ancients . Keep in mind this was First Published in the 1500s. Published into the 1600s. It was not until the 1700s did people realize foxglove was useful for treating cardiac problems. Also, culpeper was another famous person in the time. This was published around 1650. These are two of his books together. He was one of a growing number of people who thought that knowledge should not be held in the hands of the tiny few, trained physicians but given to everyone which is really good , that we have all of this in terms of, you know, i will read you a short example but most of them are quite detailed. So somebody who wanted to know more could dig into this but again much of the knowledge , would not have been new. People already knew what these medications were used for. They might have known for the most part, if they were hot or dry. He provided a lot more detail and he thought it was important to get out to the laypeople. In the 1850s, there was a huge explosion of publications that were published in england on medicine. So there really was this idea that knowledge should not remain in the hands of the physicians, that it should be spread out. On the other hand, most people already knew what this was, so there is kind of a little tradeoff there. We are going to read about the bouncing bets. Again, he is very detailed. His book is about that fit. Thick. Really small, double column. He wants to get as much information to you as he can. The roots creep underground. With many joints therein. A brown color on the outside and yellowish with in. Then it goes on and says, and a place that grows wild in many wet wet lands of this lands by brooks and the side of , running water. Continues inly part of september before they are spent. In terms of the government and virtues, government is it is governed by astrology. He was a strong believer in astrology. So he talked about with sign it was under and the virtues are what it treats. He says it been us owns it, the country people in diverse places use it to brew and put it on their fingers, hands, and legs when theyre cut to heal them up again. It is diuretical to provoke yearend and therefore to expel gravol in the kidneys and do it singularly good to avoid hydroxy lower waters. They extol it to perform an absolute cure of syphilis. More than sarsaparilla can do. So he does say the country people use it for their cuts. Other people say it is good for provoking urine and we will talk about why you might want to do that later. He has no idea if it is good for the french pox or not, but he says it is and that is what he put in so you can judge. Most of what he has is much longer. Then, there were books such as this. This is the english housewife published in 1650 by germanys markham. Markham. S it was on trend through most of the 1600s, written by a man, egg and, telling the housewife all of the virtues or characteristics she should have. One of them was in medicine. He said, it is needed that she have a physical or medicinal kind of knowledge, how to administer wholesome receipts or recipes or medicine for the good of health to prevent the first occasion of sickness and to take way the effects and evil of the same when it has made seizure on the body. One of the many characteristics is that she is supposed to know a lot about medicine. Enough to prevent illness and her family and when illness does enter her family, to take care of it. But he goes on later she should , not know too much because too much is what the physician should know. So there is a fine line between how much she can know and how much she should not know. Then there is the explosion of literature, medicine in the 1650s. Here is one of hhannah woolleys books. She did not focus exclusively on medicine. S is kind of like mark ms markhams book. So you might ask, how did they make medicine in this time period . By about 1740, there were 13 or 14 apothecaries and boston. Im not sure when they first started. We do know that in 1630, when John Winthrop came over, there was someone on board who called himself an apothecary. Whether he brought anything with him or acted as an apothecary, we do not know. Sometime around the 1700s, there were starting to be apothecaries and so apothecaries were nice in , that you could go and buy premade medicines. I am going to show you it takes , a long time to make medicines. They would also have things you might not be able to grow. Or that you would not have the ingredients to make. We will talk about what some of those are as well. I had the experience to learn what it was like to make 1700s in the actually, in the at a plantation 1600s a couple years ago. I went for a workshop and there were just two of us there and we were given a sheet about 10 pages with probably 20 to 30 botanicals on it and heres the , picture, heres what theyre called, heres what they do. In order to make a medicine like they would have had to do in the 1600s, we had to decide what we wanted to treat. We decided we wanted our medicine to treat muscle and joint pain, and also to treat inflammation. So once we decided on that, we then picked from the list about eight plants, that is how many they said you need. We picked comfrey, st. Johns wort, marshmallow, rosemary and others. Then we went out into the gardens. This is a picture of me picking from the gardens. We went to the plymouth plantation gardens. None of them grew in all one garden, we had to go to several gardens. If you have your whole plant here we were not going to take , the whole plant. We were not able to use the roots. But we took the stem, the leaves , the flowers, the seeds anything else that might be on , the stem we would take. And we had to get a lot of it. Two big baskets full of these clippings. We took them back to the workshop and cut them into pieces probably about the size of a quarter of your palm because we wanted them small enough that we could draw out all of the essences. When youre making medicine with any botanical, you want to dry out the medicinal purposes. Sometimes you can eat the herb straight, but many times, but we made is an ointment or south. Salve. We cut them up small enough so we can get as much of the essence as possible and then we put it into a pot with oil and then we left. It took about two hours. There was an intern there so she watched over this. This was the 21st century. It wouldve taken a much longer to do this over a fire but we wanted to let the plant oils soak up the essence or virtues or medicinal properties. Once that was done we no longer , needed the plants so we strained it, took the oil and , added beeswax. We melted it and we made about 20 jars. The jars were probably about this big. We made 15 to 20 jars. So if you are a housewife and only wanted to make one or two or three you would have to very carefully decide what proportion you needed. We made a a lot. We were told it lasted about a year. I tried it. It did work. Back then, though, they did not often think in terms of expiration dates so they probably wouldve kept it for much longer as long as it seemed , to work. Couple weeks ago i was up in charlestown, New Hampshire when , they are having an 18thcentury medicine day. I spent a long time talking with a midwife. She had this wonderful collection of all of these things as a midway. She had fresh herbs from her garden, fresh plants, dried herbs and plants, tinctures, salves, bottles of dried and powdered plants. I asked her, how would they know when you could not any longer use it . And she said, once it did not seem to work. So, there are a few recipes ive seen that do give expiration dates but most of them do not. I also asked her, you have quite the collection. I know you are a midwife. What would the average woman have . She said, they would have a lot of this stuff but not all of it. It would depend on woman to woman, just like we all might have our favorite spices for cooking, they would have their favorite herbs and spices for medicine. It would have varied in different households. The other types of medicines she might make our teas. Herbs ande fresh botanicals for that. They would have fruit, i have a friend who likes fruitinfused water. She puts fruit in the water. They would also steep things and had a lot of ways to do that. Going back to the plantation when we were waiting for the , plants and the oil to stew we , went back out and got some more plants and talked with one of the workers who knows a lot about medicine and she happened to have been bitten by wasp. She went over to a plant, picked it off, rubbed it on and felt better immediately. They would also use it just like that whenever they needed it. In terms of the ointments, they would store it in containers like this on the bottom right and cover it with either paper or cloth that they would tied tightly. Tie tightly. Keep in mind they might not have a lot of room to store things so they had to think carefully about what they would make to store. So what types of medicines were made . This is from my thesis, not actually published in my thesis but part of the research i did from the brigham book. She herself divided it into three sections. She did not label them. I labeled them. She did have a Different Number system for each. She considered them three different sections. About 25 or what i called external medications, 32 were waters, and 43 internal or something you would ingest. In terms of the internal, broths and cordials, lots of liquids, pills, enema, paste, and syrup. In terms of external it was a bath, a few drops would be a little bit nervous about putting anything into my eye or ear, but they did have and ear drops. Oils and would have salves, ointments, that sort of thing. Then the water, the most interesting and i think the most important. They are the basis for many things. So, waters are, anything liquid, anything you make you might put in a bunch of herbs and strain it out and keep the water. That would be a water. Even though it might be alcohol, it could be in herbal wine or alcoholic drink. They could be medication by themselves. For example, rosewater. You make it by taking roses, you distill them, you infuse them you do something with them to , come up with a water and then you can use that yourself for medication. You can also use it as an ingredient in other medications. Many times a recipe calls for a other water and herbs or botanicals. Or you could use it as a vehicle. Powders and in order to get a power powder you have , to do it with a liquid. So waters were used for all of those purposes. I wanted to see what was the most common botanicals in these 400 recipes. So, these 10 come from about 400 recipes and they are the ones that showed up in at least 20 of the recipes. Cinnamon, ginger, licorice, mace, nutmeg, raisins, rosemary, saffron, wormwood, and rue. I looked to see what they were for, and everything. There was nothing that struck out stuck out for any of them. Many of these recipes call for anywhere between five and 20 ingredients and these wouldve , been one. Notice that cinnamon, mace, not mag, and ginger net mag nutmeg, and ginger are all spices. Most imported from elsewhere said they would be more so they would be more expensive. Expensiveey are more and rare they are thought to be more potent so you would want to use them if you could. One of the other things i mentioned was these recipes have 5, 20, 30 ingredients. They would use what they had. If they did not have all 20, they would use with they had. They would modify and experiment and say, you know what . Nutmeg does not work so i will not use it again. So i will talk a little bit about how they would make medication. At least in this book, what some of the common botanicals are and , if i were to look at other books it would probably be a different mix of what would be most common because people chose recipes that they liked. Lets talk about some of the diseases. This is smallpox. This is a little girl suffering from smallpox in the 1970s. In london in the 1600s, it was an and disease, meaning it was like chickenpox. Always around, a childhood disease that you always got. It was much more lethal than chickenpox but if you survived childhood in london you were exposed to smallpox and are now immune for the rest of your life. However, in new england and boston it was a completely different story because there were just not enough people to sustain it to be an endemic disease. Be 20 or 30 might years between smallpox outbreaks, and anyone born in that time period would likely die from it or suffer from it. So smallpox was probably one of the scariest things to hit new england new england because i never knew when it was going to it hadd when it did hit a 15 to 20 mortality rate. Some of the worst outbreaks were in the 1600s and in 1721. 1721 is a unique outbreak because Cotton Mather had heard about this thing called inoculation. Inoculation is when you take someone who is sick, they have pusfilled things that they break and you put it on me, on my skin. So now i have smallpox. The idea was i would still get smallpox but a much milder case. There is a lot of contention. It was very controversial. Only one of the physicians went along with Cotton Mather, the others were against it. Many of the newspapers were against it. Benjamin franklin mentions this in one of his letters. What ended up happening was the people who were inoculated, a few of them died but most of them survived. The mortality rates among those and not generated was significantly smaller than those who were not inoculated. It was seen as a success but , remained controversial throughout the 1700s. George washington mandated after a smallpox outbreak that all of his troops be a nokia waited. Innoculated. There was a lot of controversy but it was done. Then the vaccination came out for it. There were also other epidemics including measles, diphtheria, those sorts of things were also epidemics. What really killed people where the common yes, outbreaks were bad but that only happened every 20 to 30 years. So a lot of people might die but then you had a long time before people died. It will until people is the everyday stuff. One of those things were things coming out of your body which you dont want coming up. Diarrhea, bloody diarrhea, dysentery. This is a recipe from someone who lived in new england, massachusetts in the 1750s. Michelle kaufmann wrote a book about her called one colonial womans world. In the end, she included her recipe book. Those are her recipes for all sorts of fluxes. Take two courts of new milk, oak bark. And outward you would know what to do with this. She does not tell us what to do with us, but households in these days would know what to do. You did whatever you do with it. You give it four times. The first time, as hot as you can drink it. The next time, not quite as hot. 4 00 in the morning and 4 00 at night. Another thing they had issues with was digestion. We still have issues with it today. This is spirit of mint. Spirit often meant oil. Spirit we can think of it as similar to essential oils we think of today, and this is from Martha Washingtons cookbook. The infirmities of the stomach, and covers the spirits and preserves from the important parts putrefaction. It expelled wind. They should be taking taken morning and evening. The concoction can be thought of as digestion but they thought of it as a different way than we did. Then they thought the stomach was like a little oven. The food would go down to your stomach and cook. If it cooked well, you would have good digestion. If it did not cook well, it would stay in your stomach, putrefy and all kinds of bad things can happen because it would become poisonous or give off poisonous vapors. It was very bad. You wanted it to go well. Spirit of mint was supposed to help that. And then worms. Everybody had worms back then. Talku went to joe bagleys , he talked about the excavation of a privy of a wealthy woman in the late 1600s. She found in the privy evidence of worms in her household. All had it. Kids, adults, rich, poor. You all had worms. Milk, boil it until it becomes a kurd and let the , children take it. There were also solutions specifically for children and there are also other recipes for different parts of the body to get rid of the worms. And then there are womens issues. I am specifically not talking about childbirth because that is not something that would be done in the home. You would call in a midwife to help with childcare issues childbirth issues. But they did have to take care of themselves and take care of the issues that might arise. One of them could be that you were not having your period. Not having your period is a bad thing if you are not pregnant. The reason why is just like the food that does not decoct in and stomach, aching putrefy menstrual blood can do the same in your womb. It causes all kinds of problems, so you do not want to not have your. Period if you were a woman of that age. If youre pregnant that is ok, because it is feeding the baby or ok if you are breastfeeding because the menstrual blood was being transformed to breastmilk and being given to the child. It is not staying in your system. But if youre not pregnant, breastfeeding, and not having bad stuff could happen. So this is a recipe. All of the things i am going to read are known. They are madder root juniper , berries, mugwort, mother time, samicle, bay berries. You would brew it in beer and wine and drink a pint daily until they come, they meaning the period. She spent some time at this recipe and she decided it probably was not for abortion. Aboard a fashions abortafacients are things that can start an abortion. Is just used as an amenigog, not an abortificant. It may have been used as a code word, some of the recipes. That is the talk of the midwife. That is all i will say about that. They knew about womens issues and many of the recipes deal with menstrual and vaginal disorders in the brigham account books. And then id like this, because i have a cough. I like the idea that they knew how to make cough drops back then. This is how to make an excellent pellet for a cough. Take juice of the licorice, sugar candy, alkerms, ambergreece, oyle of ammiseeds, gum dragon, red rose water. You do some various things to it and when it looks like a paste take it out and cut it into , pellets and when they are dried you may take them when you please. Let them lie in your mouth and dissolve. They had cough drops back then they back then. I would not have thought about that until i came across this recipe. This is a remedy for the dropsy, whether hot or cold. Dropsy is an accumulation of fluid in the body. Notice that this is hot or cold. You could have too many hot humors or too many cold humors, either way it could construct the but either way that this should work. There is red mint, or what we call blind nettles and sage. Stamp them together, put them in a mortar and mix them up. Strain the juice of them into some stale ale. Drink morning and evening. God willing, it will affect a cure. One of the things that i did for my thesis is i looked at efficacy statements of how well does this work. It is not that common to say it will affect the cure. That is not you are hoping to do with medicine. I am going to tell you what you were hoping to do with medicine, but you were not expected to be cured very often. So if the recipes said it would affect the cure, that is a pretty strong statement. She says god willing it will effect the cure. So, now we are going to move into what was effective medication. Had, if you were sick, you to bang many humors, you had an many humors,too you had an imbalance. You wanted to get the humors out. You wanted to get them out by whatever means possible. Vomiting, diarrhea, provoking the urine, diarrhea, sweat, putting them in bed by the fire and letting them sweat, they would also do cupping. You mightve seen on the olympics a year or two ago all , of the red spots. Olympians were doing it for a different reason. Skin andted cup to the it would bring blood to the surface. They were getting things out. Often they would purposely make a blister so that there would be a lot of pus, again, getting stuff out. The better the medicine worked, the more stuff it got out. So it was not to make you better, medicine that worked was one that got a whole bunch of stuff out. And then hopefully the idea was, eventually you would feel better. The medicine itself would not get you better. It would just get the bad stuff out so your humors could get back into balance. So here is a picture of someone bloodletting. You would call a professional for bloodletting. There were many herbal and botanical things that would help with the purge, and i will talk about a couple of them. Bloodletting was a very popular way of getting rid of excess humors. This would require a physician or somebody who is trained to it. Rained in depending upon how well you are and what kind of illness you had or what kind of symptoms you had, what time of year was, they might bleed you from your head, from your arm, from your leg, from your foot all kinds of , things went into how much to lead you. Bleeding was not done in children because it was thought to be too dangerous but they had blistering and cupping and all of the other types of purging for kids. It could sometimes go awry. There is some research into the death of George Washington in 1799, he came down with a threat throat distemper which is , some kind of throat illness. He wanted to be heavily bled. He asked for that. A researcher has looked at all of the notes of the various physicians who treated him over the next 48 hours. They took 3. 75 litres of his blood in a 24 hour period, and he died. That is over half of his blood. Sometimes it can go awry. So here is an example of purge for the protection of the doubt , asell as doubt gout well as the cure. Drink it fasting and keep to your chamber. I do not know if this causes you to have upward or downward purging so you will need to stick dear chambers. You will take it four times in a year for prevention and if you , have it again, then you are going to take it again for cure of a flare of gout. Gout was fairly common back then, especially in men. And then we moved to magic. They would not have called it magic and it would not be magic as we think of it today but , another completely reasonable thing they can use that was completely consistent with their religious belief. We today would probably call it magic, some of it. How many of you are harry potter fans . I am not sure if i am saying it right, but how many of you know what this is . Just shout it out and i will repeat it. I remember the scene but not what it was for. Prof. Price do you remember what it was for . What i remember was for poison. Ron was poisoned. What they are. They were used for harry potter. In harry potter, ron was poisoned. Harry wanted to save the day and he remembered he just learned about this thing that was an antidote to poison. He ran and got it and run was cured. Referred tocommonly as stones that, the gut of a goat. They were thought to be an antidote against poison as shown in harry potter. They were also thought to be an antidote to other things. When you taken inanimate object such as the stone, or plants or minerals, stones that have extra, for whatever reason they have extra strong power and if you use them you are going to have stronger medicine. This is an example from Martha Washingtons cookbook, and this is where she uses three waters. She does not say how we get the beazer water. I assume that you take the stone and put it in some sort of water or liquid, perhaps alcoholic, haps some other botanicals. Do your distillation or whatever you are going to do, and in the end you have the water. You take the water and it is antidote against contagion of the plague, the purples, a skin disorder, smallpox and measles. Take two spoonfuls mixed with water to prevent these things. Because you are using the beazor Even Stronger is and supposed to be a good antidote. This is one that i believe has some ritualistic things but im still trying to figure them out. This comes from the brigham account book, but this is found in many recipe books and it was a common recipe that many chose to include in their recipe books. It says it is a most approved water. And it is called cock water. Take a running cock and kill him alive and when he is almost cold, cut him above the back, take out his entrails, and wipe him clean. This is the part i think is ritualistic cut him in quarters and break the bones. I am not sure why you would do that. Then you are going to add andral herbs, currants, raisins, and three more magical items. A puddle of new milk from a red cow. The new milk of a red cow, i hear about most often. I do not know if there is something unique or magical about a red cow. When i gave this talk a couple of months ago, someone suggested it could be a different species with different fat content in its milk. Whether they knew about fat content back then, or just knew that this kind of milk worked really well that could be a , possibility. Leaf gold is what you think it is. This would only be the very wealthy who could put this in. Prepared pearl would be like the pearls you where around your neck. And things that you would get from an apothecary. Other things you might get from an apothecary are things like unicorn horn which we know does not exist, so that is an example of fraud and then m from egypt. Is mummy that is what you went into by. Whether you got that was questionable, but it was thought to have properties as well. It was not the mummy itself but the wrappings and the resins were believed to have magic properties. And they had to another kind of magical transference where you would transfer your illness to an animal or inanimate object. This is to cure plague or pestilence from the brigham account book. If you have swelling under the ears, armpits or groin, draw , them forth, pull off the feathers of pigeons or chickens, hold them hard to the swelling and keep them at the part until they die. Lets say i have it in my armpit, break the boil here. Take one of these birds, pull up off all the tail feathers. Probably something magically there, then take the bird by the bill and hold it there until it dies. The thought is then, once it dies, he has died from the plague not from the trauma being , held like this, from the plague, so now you are free of the plague because you have transferred it from you to the bird. Then, sympathetic magic. Sympathetic magic is using things that look alike to do something. For example, from the brigham account book to prevent a woman rrying a child, it says to use blood red silk. It does not say what to do with it. I brought this up with the herbalist i saw. He said, of course that was , sympathetic magic because it is shiny and red and stringy, and the blood is shiny and read and stringy. They would tie off the blood flow with the silk. Another example part of the same recipe is to take a broth. So some plants are thought to have Properties Like this. It was cows feet or knuckles and they are thought to be like this. Therefore, you were knitting together the bottom of the womb and the child cannot get out. That is an example of sympathetic magic. Astrology, astrology was added at the zenith i guess in english in the mid1600s when it was the most popular and seen as a science. If you really got into it, if i was ill and i would go to my astrologist or physician or whoever practiced astrology and , they would find out what sign was born under, what sign i was under when i contracted the illness and when my symptoms , started and what symptoms they are and they would decide based on all that information what unique treatment i need based on all of those signs. Whether that probably was not all that, because it took a lot of knowledge to do that, what was much more common was to find out when was the best time for an astrological sign to plant herbs and other plants to harvest them when they had their most potency. That was in almanacs. They were quite popular, because in large part of the medical astrology sections they had. When people wanted to get rid of said,when the publisher this is just a bunch of hooey, we want to get rid of that, people said, no way, so that persisted. Make a gasay to powder. It takes the cause of crabs when the sign is in cancer, june 22 to july 22. Thorn, aunces of heart perl and coral, two ounces of white amber, a quarter ounce of bezar. This is good against smallpox and fevers. Called that sot it is unclear whether they are referring to the plant or the animal, but in either case you want to take it when it is in cancer. That is when you would get the most potency from this medication. Up until now we have talked about medicine, magic, and astrology. People take everything they like, just like today we have western medicine alternative , medicine, there are people like me who believe strongly in western medication. There are some things no matter what i will not take. I will only rely on western medication but other things, i might want to try Something Like an essential oil before i take aspirin. People back then did the same thing. They would take things that make sense to them, use them. They might have their favorite medicines and remedies. There was one more thing from which they could draw. Remember there were two main differences from galenic medicine. In galenic medicine, there were no distinct diseases. If people had similar symptoms, it was not because they had the same disease. Your humors were in balanced. They relied heavily on botanical medicine nation. Medication. Paracelsian medicine used other things. If i have a headache and you have a headache, then we need to use the same treatment because it is the same thing, the same source. It is not the humors, they are distinct diseases. They also really liked using chemical drugs such as lead, sulfur, mercury. It became stronger and stronger until, i was surprised when i was researching one of my ancestors who fought in the mexicanamerican war in the 1840s, that a lot of the men were complaining about the treatments, which were sulfur and mercury. And i was like, was he really trying to kill them . Because they thought he was trying to kill them. I thought, was he really trying to kill them . No, that was the Gold Standard of medicine. This medicine. There was a whole religious the ology which i am not familiar , with but because of that it became popular with puritan physicians because they like the religious with it. One of the things that it reintroduced as part of galenic lost, itbut had been was brought into popularity, was the doctrine of signatures. It is like sympathetic magic, light treats light. Like treats like. So yellow saffron would be good for jaundice. Kidney beans, good for kidneys. There like ferns are good for baldness. There were many more. There were all kinds of things they thought treated like best. And last but not least, religion. There could be a spiritual cause to your symptoms. If you are thinking galenic medicine, god could cause your humors to go out of balance as a punishment from him. You are not doing what you are supposed to be doing. How they determined whether something was a spiritual cause versus the other causes i told you about, i am not sure how they knew, but somehow they did. If it was a spiritual cause, you needed to repent and fast and make yourself right by god. The minister was much more than more useful than a physician at this time because the minister could help you make yourself right with god. And so, even know some of the things could now no longer be an a home this again would be a the things the house wife and her family would keep in mind. All of the things we talked about. The only thing they would really go outside of the house for, might go to the apothecary because it takes a long time to make medication. They might go to the minister if there is a spiritual cause or for bloodletting, cupping, and blistering, they would get to a physician. But they would know that these were possibilities and they would decide on their on their on their own what they should do based on what the situation was. People always ask about native american medicine. Did they use native american medicine . The answer is yes, eventually. Not right away because there were two conflicting thoughts. One is that english herbs are best for english bodies. We and our ancestors have lived in england for centuries, used these herbs and botanicals for centuries, we know theyre good for english bodies and even though we have now moved to this new place called new england, we are still english men and women so english herbs are still best , for english bodies. So that was the tide to england, to keep usingand the same stuff they were using for some it centuries. But there is also another popular thought that wherever you were there word diseases specific to that place and god would place the things you needed to treat those diseases in that place. So from what climate, soever is subject to any particular disease, in the same place there grows a cure. So they were no longer in england, they were in new england new place, potentially , new diseases, new symptoms, so they should be using what was there. Where better to learn from that than from the native americans who had been using them for centuries. In the end they did use and again, depended on the person. Some people were more likely to take them than others, but is one more thing for them to drop. I talked mostly about the house wife, want to talk more about other members of the household. Young children, especially young women, if someone was sick there needed to be someone watching them all the time and that usually fell to the young women. Usually the children. Men would be involved, and they would be involved mostly, some of them would help make medications. Some of them would help but that was rare, at least in england. I am basing that on english research. One of the things that men did in england and new england was right letters. Letters. One of the things it was quite popular was writing same, my wife is really sick and i need, i am writing to you the physician or to you, my motherinlaw, what is your favorite recipe to a about the symptoms she has . So they were very involved in that aspect. So that is all that i have. Now we are open for questions. Remember, if you have a question, just stand up and they will come to you with the boom mic. [applause] professor price are there any questions . I am just wondering how soon it was when you had all of those imported things like the mace and nutmeg, do those come in the early 17th century . Or was it later . Prof. Price her question is about all of the imported things such as the mace and nutmeg, with a here earlier on, or did they come later . The answer is, im not sure. My guess is they would be later. To my knowledge, there is a dearth of research about when things were available here in new england. I know a lot about when things were available in england and knowing they were available in england, yes they couldve come , over. Not in 1620 or 1630 because you needed plants and other things, clothing to survive. So when did they come . My guess would be the late 1600s. But i am not sure and that is something that when i start to look at these cookbooks and other records from the cookbooks in new england i am hoping to learn some of those things because theres not a lot out there as far as i know. So, the gold leaf, the pearl, etc. , are as you pointed out, very expensive. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about social status and people who essentially were elite, had wealth, versus who did not . Did they see the recipes as adages additive rather than cumulative, that you could use whatever of the list of ingredients that you wanted to, if you want to make it better or more intense the added maybe some of the more exotic ingredients . I am intrigued by the social status of people. Certainly the women are literate and some of these are expensive recipes. Prof. Price the question was i think there were two questions. The first question is, talk about the social status. Some of the things i mentioned, the leaf gold the pearls, very , expensive. Who will be using those . The second question is whether they were additive or cumulative. Do you need to have everything . Is that right . One of the things i should have mentioned is that the recipe books that we have by and large come from wealthy people because they were the ones who were literate and could write things down. So we do not know we know that some of the less wealthy people were using some of the same recipes. We dont know exactly what they are using because much of the they used was passed down orally and not written down. There is a bias we wouldve had toward wealthier people. Having said that, whether it was cumulative or additive is that people would use what they had. So even if your recipe called for gold leaf and girl, if you could not afford it you would use the other stuff that you did have. You would use what you have. People in this period, especially in england, were really interested in experimentation. So science and philosophy, what we call science today was becoming very popular and there were all of these journals and societies and various things, and what people could do in the household was take the medication or the recipe that they got from someone and experiment. See if they added this thing of it would make it better or worse. So there was experimentation but mostly they used what they had. Over here. My question sort of centered around the one slide that you had that had the various amenagogs in red. Anyess, do you have expansion on that in terms of like the older remedies or Home Remedies that now have modern research that is back to like maybe a potential benefit . Prof. Price i think one of the things i can her question was about the amenegogs and abortifacients, and what do we use medically that they used. What got me interested in general, i am a statistician, i worked in bio stats. But in terms of history, one of the classes i took was a World History class and i was signed trying to find a paper i liked and i ended up coming up with two books that were published in the medieval times. Going back to your question, people who had very limited access. I looked at whether, i looked at two things. I looked at womens disorders, mostly dealing with menstrual disorders and i looked at childbirth. And i was like, which ones really work according to our definition today and which ones are superstitious . I found that by and large, in terms of the medical not the , childbirth but mental disorders, they knew what they were doing. A lot of that has been proved today. They knew what theyre doing and they knew they could cause abortions with these. Some people would use that to cause abortions. Back then, abortion was not illegal until you felt the child quicken, which was around four to five months or move inside , you. Up until then, you could argue, i did not know i was pregnant. Even when you felt the baby move, you might know it was the baby but others might not know. Some people might use them for abortions and many people either did not know or did not care if they were put in. They did not want to cause an abortion but they wanted to get the menstrual blood flowing again. By and large, they worked very well in causing an abortion and they worked well as an amended. Og amenigog thank you very much. This was very informative. One thing that resonated for me, common botanicals, things like cinnamon and ginger have a current application for healing properties, so many times probably a lot of that stuff did work and that is why the strength of that legacy came down and now there is western science to kind of legitimize it. So some of those common botanicals are a list of some super foods, medicinal foods. Prof. Price her comment was more of a comment than a question. Any of them like cinnamon have proven benefits today. And so i would agree with you that they may not have known exactly what they were doing back them but they had a good idea that if they had a lot of ingredients on two or three work day might not have known which two or but there was a lot of three, stuff they did back then that has been proven today to work. Right here, the lady standing up. This is the other end of the question about expensive ingredients. What is roach elm . Prof. Price i googled that. It is not expensive, i do not think. I was trying to figure out what it is used for. It is used today, if you think of baking powder, you want to get the kind without ellum in it. It is basically some sort of crystalline, and maybe others know. Google did not serve me well. Some sort of crystalline thing they could use. So it was not a plant. It was some sort of mineral or crystal. Do you have any idea . It is something people can still get today, i think. No, it is a mineral. It is a mineral or rock or crystal. It is not insectbased. Ok. I have a comment and a question. My comment was you had mentioned astrology or seasonal watching the signs, choosing to harvest the herb at a specific time. I guess my comment there would be that the plants, they flower they bloom or go to seed at , different times and then it would have different properties. This i find interesting in a time where they had a lot of time to observe nature and observe their gardens and that space. So maybe if you can speak to that. My other question is, what are you doing for your cough and sore throat . Take this cough drops. One question is what do you do for a cough or sore throat . I do have several recipes. The one that i showed you had various things in it that you could use as cough drops. Her first question, the final question it will have to be how they knew what the astrology when you should harvest something for leaves rather than its flowers that you might want to harvest it at different times. This was developed over centuries so they knew when, they had learned when the best time was to harvest things. Were they always right . Probably not. But were they right a lot . Probably. This was what they did to survive. So this was not the only thing they did. Certainly they had to do a whole lot of other things but making , medicine in the home was something the woman had to know pretty well. So i will stick around if there are any further questions but we cant take any further questions now. Thank you very much. [applause] this weekend on American History tv on cspan3, today, the 70th anniversary of the hollywood hearing before the house unamerican activities committee. What was your last employment . I just finished a picture called the tall target. Did you represent with those ceos . 26i have been in theater years and i think i am well enough to know them from the roles i have played. Were you a member of the communist party in 1942 . I stand on the grounds of the fifth amendment that it might incriminate or degrade me. The word communist those quote is an emotional and hysterical word, much like the word witch. a discussion on civil war monuments. It was about victory. The victory celebrated in so many confederate monuments was the victory over reconstruction. Sunday on reel america. President of the united states, welcomed the Prime Minister to great britain. The gravity to the moment that brought them together. At 8 00 on the presidency, alexandra recruiter talks about her book. Gradually, starting in the late 60s 1960s, versions of the film began to leak out, and people began to see it. And when they saw it, because of looks, itat the film did not look like what the Warren Commission concluded. American history tv, all weekend, every weekend, only on monday night on the ofmunicators, the rise Addictive Technology in the business of keeping us up. We know the dangers, they dont say we builtin mechanisms. Never get high on your own supply. If you are creating something, you know with the dangers are very those who you love and hold dear are not going to be affected by them. Watch the communicators, on cspan2. Each week, american artifacts takes viewers into Historic Sites around the country. We visit the National Constitution center in philadelphia to learn about the knife the life and history of john marshall