Making medicines in the early modern household

Bulletin of the History of Medicine

Volumn 82, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 145-168

  Leong, Elaine ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Early modern; Early modern drugs and pharmacy; Gender; Household; Medical marketplace

Indexed keywords

EID: 41549104538     PISSN: 00075140     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/bhm.2008.0042     Document Type: Article

References (150)

1. r-v. The inventories can also be found in the modern edition of Freke's papers: Elizabeth Freke, The Remembrances of Elizabeth Freke, 1671-1714, ed. Raymond A. Anselment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 177-78 (hereafter Remembrances). In subsequent notes, where possible, references to both the manuscript and the modern edition will be provided. It should be noted that the modern edition does not include Freke's extensive recipe collection or her reading notes.
2. r (Remembrances, pp. 177-78).
3. My survey of manuscript recipe collections in twelve major research libraries in the United Kingdom and the United States identified 259 collections (a collection was defined as a group of thirty or more recipes). My analysis of printed recipe collections in the period suggests that 236 such collections were issued between 1600 and 1700, of which sixty were new titles and 176 were reprints. For details, definitions, and the full parameters of the analysis, see Elaine Leong, "Medical Recipe Collections in Seventeenth-Century England: Knowledge, Gender and Text" (D.Phil, thesis, University of Oxford, 2005), pp. 20-67.
4. See Harold. J. Cook, The Decline of the Old Medical Regime in Stuart London (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986);
5. Cook, Trials of an Ordinary Doctor: Joannes Groenevelt in Seventeenth-Century London (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1994);
6. Charles Webster and Margaret Pelling, "Medical Practitioners," in Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Charles Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1979), pp. 165-235;
7. Margaret Pelling, Medical Conflicts in Early Modern London: Patronage, Physicians and Irregular Practitioners 1550-1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003);
8. Mary E. Fissell, Patients, Power and the Poor in Eighteenth-Century Bristol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
9. See footnote 4 and Mark S. Jenner and Patrick Wallis (eds.), Medicine and the Market in England and Its Colonies, c. 1450-c. 1850 (Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) for literature on the medical marketplace.
10. Literature on the "patient's view" includes Roy Porter, "The Patient's View: Doing Medical History from Below," Theory & Society, 1985, 14: 175-98;
11. Porter, ed., Patients and Practitioners: Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre-Industrial Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985);
12. Lucinda M. Beier, Sufferers and Healers: The Experience of Illness in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987).
13. Michael MacDonald's and Ronald Sawyer's studies of Richard Napier's clientele have shown that for many sufferers, the first port of call for medical care was one's family and friends, and the setting for these medical activities was the domestic sphere: Michael MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981);
14. Ronald Sawyer, "Patients, Healers and Disease in the Southeast Midlands, 1597-1634" (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1986).
15. Beier, Sufferers and Healers (n. 5); Doreen Evenden Nagy, Popular Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988);
16. Linda A. Pollock, With Faith and Physic: The Life of a Tudor Gentlewoman (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), part 3.
17. See, e.g., Evenden Nagy, Popular Medicine (n. 6), chap. 5 (esp. pp. 73, 76).
18. One of the best-known case studies on women and medicine in early modern England is Linda Pollock's study of Lady Grace Mildmay 's personal papers. Other such studies include Lucinda Beier's studies of Margaret Hoby, Alice Thornton, and thejosselin family, and Leonard Guthrie's study of the "Lady Sedley" notebook: Pollock, With Faith and Physick (n. 6.);
19. Beier, Sufferers and Healers (n. 5);
20. Leonard Guthrie, "The Lady Sedley's Receipt Book 1686 and Other Seventeenth Century Receipt Books," Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 1913, 6: 150-69.
21. There is a blossoming body of literature on "receipt books." The main studies are Jennifer Stine, "Opening Closets: The Discovery of Household Medicine in Early Modern England" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1996);
22. Lisa Smith, "Women's Healthcare in England and France, 1650-1775" (Ph.D. thesis, University of Essex, 2001);
23. Catherine Field, "'Many Hands Hands': Early Modern Women's Recipe Books and the Politics of Writing Food for the Nation" (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 2006);
24. Alisha Rankin, "Medicine for the Uncommon Woman: Remedy Exchange among Noblewomen in Early Modern Germany" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2005);
25. and Leong, "Medical Recipe Collections" (n. 3). The main published sources include Evenden Nagy, Popular Medicine (n. 6);
26. Beier, Sufferers and Healers (n. 5);
27. Lynette Hunter, "Women and Domestic Medicine: Lady Experimenters, 1570-1620" and Hunter, "Sisters of the Royal Society: The Circle of Ratherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh," in Women, Science and Medicine 1500-1700, ed. Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hut-ton (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1997), pp. 89-107 and 178-97.
28. For an assessment of culinary recipes, see Sara Pennell, "The Material Culture of Food in Early Modern England, circa 1650-1750" (D.Phil, thesis, University of Oxford, 1997);
29. Pennell, "Perfecting Practice? Women, Manuscript Recipes and Knowledge in Early Modern England," in Early Modern Women's Manuscript Writing. Selected Papers from the Trinity/Trent Colloquium, ed. Victoria Burke and Jonathan Gibson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 237-58.
30. For a discussion of social aspects of recipe collecting, see Pennell, "Perfecting Practice?" (n. 9)
31. and Elaine Leong and Sara Pennell, "Recipe Collections and the Currency of Medical Knowledge in the Early Modern 'Medical Marketplace,'" in Jenner and Wallis, Medicine and the Market (n. 5), pp. 133-52.
32. The twenty-eight recipe collections were chosen to represent a cross-section of the genre in seventeenth-century England: male/female compilers in the early/mid/late seventeenth-century time periods, and in both manuscript and print form. For a more detailed description of the database and the texts used for analysis, see Leong, "Medical Recipe Collections" (n. 3), pp. 69-85.
33. Ibid., p. 85.
34. See Anselment's introduction to Remembrances for a fuller description of the Freke family genealogy. A genealogy of the Frekes was drawn up by Ralph Freke in the eighteenth century (later edited and enlarged by John Freke) and exists in manuscript form as "A pedigree or genealogy of ye family of the Frekes," Oxford, Bodleian Library (hereafter Bodleian), MS Eng. Misc. c. 203. The manuscript was printed by Middlehill in 1825, and an annotated copy is included in the Carbery bequest at the British Library as MS Add. 45721B.
35. Freke writes of repeated visits between the three sisters. While little is known of Lady Austen, Frances Norton's biography is included in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as a religious writer, the author of The Applause of Virtue (London, 1705) and Memento Mori: or, Meditations on Death (London, 1705):
36. Sarah Ross, "Norton, Frances, Lady Norton (1644-1731)," in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), at http://www.oxforddnb.com/ view/article/20343 (accessed 20 June 2007).
37. v (Remembrances, p. 54).
38. r-v. (Remembrances, pp. 98, 84-86).
39. Anselment identifies two doctor Jeffrys or Jefferies operating in the Norfolk region during this period (Remembrances, p. 98 n. 171).
40. The Freke papers, given by Lady Mary Carbery to the British Library, contain three of Freke's notebooks. The white vellum volume ("white") comprises drafts of the remembrances, and the culinary and medical recipe collection; the brown wallpaper volume, BL, MS Add. 45719 (hereafter "brown"), contains a second, neater copy of the remembrances. The third volume consists of geographical and historical notes collected by Freke. In addition to the Anselment modern edition, Lady Carbery herself edited Freke's papers and published them as Mrs Elizabeth Freke, Her Diary 1671 to 1714, ed. M. Carbery (Cork: Guy, 1913).
41. Anselment has written on Elizabeth's remembrances as a "self-portrait," and on Freke's attitudes to her own health: Raymond Anselment, "Elizabeth Freke's Remembrances: Reconstructing a Self," Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 1997, 16 (1): 57-75;
42. Anselment, "'The Want of Health': An Early Eighteenth-Century Self-Portrait of Sickness," Literature & Medicine, 1996, 15 (2): 225-43.
43. John Gerard, The Herball or Generall Histories ofPlantes (London, 1597, 1633, and 1636). Freke's transcription was taken from the enlarged 1633 or 1636 editions.
44. Nicholas Culpeper, Culpeper's School of Physick or the Experimental Practice of the Whole Art (London, 1659 and many subsequent editions).
45. George Bate, Pharmacopoeia Bateana (London, 1694),
46. Moise Charas, The Royal Pharmacopoea; Galenical and Chymical (London, 1678),
47. Nicholas Culpeper, Pharmacopoeia Londinensis or the London Dispensatory (London, 1649?).
48. See also Leong, "Medical Recipe Collections" (n. 3), pp. 261-63.
49. Freke's 1711 household inventory lists several other vernacular medical texts from which she wrote no notes in her notebook: they include John Colbatch, A Collection of Tracts Chirurgical (London, 1699);
50. John Pechey, The Compleat Herbal of Physical Plants (London, 1694);
51. and a volume titled "The family physitian," which most probably refers to either Gideon Harvey, The Family Physician and the House Apothecary (London, 1676 and 1678),
52. or George Hartman, The Family Physitian (London, 1696). Internal evidence suggests that she most probably owned Hartman's volume rather than Harvey's: in her reading notes and her recipe collection, she cites many authors who also contributed to Hartman's work, and, as discussed below, a large number of recipes to make the medicaments stored in Freke's cupboards can be found in the volume.
53. r (Remembrances, pp. 327-29).
54. r (Remembrances, pp. 164-87).
55. v (Remembrances, pp. 187-88).
56. In comparing the medicines listed in the inventories with the medical recipes in Freke's collection, I am comparing names of medicines with recipe titles. While I acknowledge that early modern medicines were often referred to by several names, and that there are a large number of recipes for each medicine, I would argue that the coincidence of Freke's owning both the actual medicine and the instructions to make it strongly suggests a link between the two.
57. v. Elizabeth traced the receipt's origin, calling it "A Pallsey Water Lady Freke, wch now goes by the Lady St Johns Dropes: Tho the original is my grandmothers of Dorsettshier"; this description is suggestive of the difficulties with nomenclature when it comes to recipes.
58. r.
59. v.
60. v.
61. r.
62. v.
63. r.
64. r. There are numerous versions in Hartman, The Family Physitian (n. 20); see, e.g., the two recipes on pp. 291-92.
65. r.
66. v.
67. r.
68. v (Remembrances, pp. 97 and 191).
69. r-v (Remembrances, pp. 84-86).
70. Hartman, The Family Physitian (n. 20), pp. 293, 308, 303-4, 295, 291, 298, 289, 285, 297, 326, 291-92.
71. Nagy, Popular Medicine (n. 6), p. 69.
72. r (Remembrances, pp. 177-78).
73. The recipe for "aqua mirabolus" appears in at least eleven of the thirty recipe collections analyzed-namely, the manuscript notebooks of Lady Ayscough (London, Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine (hereafter Wellcome), Western MS 1026) and Anne and Elizabeth Bertie (Bodleian, MS Eng. Misc. d 436); the family notebook linked with Philip Stanhope, the Earl of Chesterfield (Wellcome Western MS 761-2); the notebook linked with the Cary family (Bodleian, MS Don e. 11); John Evelyn's recipe collection (BL, MS Add. 78337);
74. Elizabeth Grey, Countess of Kent, A Choice Manual (London, 1653);
75. The Queens Closet Opened (London, 1655);
76. The Accomplished Ladies Delight (London, 1675);
77. Hannah Woolley, The Queen-like Closet (London, 1670);
78. and the notebook linked with the Fairfax family, published as Arcana Fairfaxiana Manuscripta. A Manuscript Volume of Apothecaries Lore and Housewifery Nearly Three Centuries Old, Used and partly Written by the Fairfax Family, with an introduction by G. Weddell (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1890).
79. v.
80. David Haycock and Patrick Wallis, Quackery and Commerce in Seventeenth Century London: The Proprietary Medicine Business of Anthony Daffy, Supplement to Medical History, 2005.
81. Anthony Daffy, Elixir Salutis: The Choise Drink of Health (London, 1674), pp. 2-5.
82. v.
83. r.
84. r (Remembrances, pp. 79, 83).
85. r;
86. for a more in-depth look at the Okeover manuscript, see Richard Aspin, "Illustration from the Wellcome Library: Who Was Elizabeth Okeover?" Medical History, 2000, 4: 531-40. The medicine was also made commercially and was advertised in a broadsheet in London in 1690 under the title The Virtues and Uses of the Queen of Hungary's Water.
87. v.
88. v (Remembrances, pp. 98-99).
89. r (Remembrances, p. 152).
90. r;
91. r (Remembrances, pp. 152-53, 268).
92. Hartman, The Family Physitian (n. 20), p. 22.
93. v (Remembrances, pp. 244-45);
94. v (Remembrances, pp. 88, 93-94).
95. r (Remembrances, p. 91).
96. r (Remembrances, p. 158).
97. Freke had made extensive reading notes from the second edition (either 1633 or 1636) of this expensive and difficult to obtain book: Leong, "Medical Recipe Collections" (n. 3), pp. 273-75.
98. v.
99. v.
100. v.
101. v.
102. r.
103. v.
104. v.
105. v.
106. Leong, "Medical Recipe Collections" (n. 3), pp. 93-94.
107. r.
108. r.
109. The approximately nine thousand medical recipes in the twenty-eight collections surveyed in the database together generated more than forty-three thousand ingredient entries and more than three thousand individual ingredients: Leong, "Medical Recipe Collections" (n. 3), pp. 98-105.
110. Ibid., pp. 102-3.
111. For analyses of the role of sugar in early modern Europe, see Kim F. Hall, "Culinary Spaces, Colonial Spaces: The Gendering of Sugar in the Seventeenth Century," in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects and Subjectivities, ed. Valerie Traub, Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 168-90;
112. Jane O'Hara May, "Foods or Medicines? A Study in the Relationship between Foodstuffs and Materia Medica from the 16th to the 19th Century," Transactions of the British Society of the History of Pharmacy, 1971, 1: 61-97.
113. Leonard Meager, The New Art of Gardening with the Gardener's Almanack (London, 1699), pp. 89-90;
114. The Country House-wives Garden (1617), in William Lawson, The New Orchard and Garden (1618), pp. 12-17.
115. Harvey, The Family Physician (n. 20), pp. 4-5.
116. Ibid., pp. 134-35. Harvey wrote that cinnamon was 8s. a pound and nutmegs 6s. a pound in 1678. Sugar candy could also be bought at the grocers at Is. 8d. a pound for white sugar, and 10d a pound for brown.
117. v.
118. v.
119. Harvey, The Family Physician (n. 20), p. 4.
120. Ibid., p. 5.
121. Wallis has also argued for the combining of domestic and commercial medical products: Patrick Wallis, "Apothecaries and the Consumption and Retailing of Medicines in Early Modern London," in From Physick to Pharmacology: Five Hundred Years of British Drug Retailing, ed. Louis Hill Curth (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 13-28, on pp. 15-16.
122. For a fuller discussion of the methods and equipment cited in the wider survey, see Leong, "Medical Recipe Collections" (n. 3), pp. 105-8.
123. r. These are pieces of equipment recommended by Thomas Brugis in The Marrow of Physick (London, 1640), part 1, pp. 86-87.
124. Leong, "Medical Recipe Collections" (n. 3), p. 106-7.
125. Ibid., p. 106.
126. Ibid.
127. Ibid., p. 107.
128. Sara Pennell, "'Great Quantities of Gooseberry Pye and Baked Clod of Beef: Victualling and Eating Out in Early Modern London," in Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London, c. 1500-c. 1750, ed. Paul Griffiths and Mark S. R. Jenner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 228-49, on p. 241.
129. For further details on household and kitchen equipment, see Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain 1660-1760 (London: Routledge, 1988).
130. r.
131. v. This "infuse/distill" pattern can also be observed in the recipes in the "cordial water" section in Hartman, The Family Physitian (n. 20), pp. 274-94; there are a small number of recipes within the section that forgo the infusion stage and require only distillation using either a limbeck, a cold still, or a "balneo" (bain marie).
132. v).
133. r. Freke does not indicate the exact quantity of the salve that would be produced by this recipe.
134. r-v.
135. v.
136. v.
137. v.
138. r.
139. "Aqua mirabolus" was an ingredient in a number of recipes, including one for "an excellent cordial water for dizziness and swimming in the head" in Sir Kenelm Digby, Choice and Experiemented Receipts in Physick and Chirurgery (London, 1668), pp. 273-74,
140. and in a medicine for the cold in the collection of the Fairfax family in Arcana Fairfaxiana (n. 40), p. 193.
141. v (Remembrances, p. 188).
142. r-v (Remembrances, pp. 84-87).
143. v.
144. Harvey, The Family Physician (n. 20), pp. 19-21.
145. Wallis, "Apothecaries" (n. 76), p. 14;
146. Patrick Wallis, "Consumption, Retailing and Medicine in Early-Modern London," Econ. Hist. Rev., 2008, 61: 26-53, on pp. 42-43.
147. v (Remembrances, p. 285).
148. For discussions of early modern closets, see Lena Cowen Orlin, "Gertrude's Closet," Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 1998, 134: 44-67.
149. v (Remembrances, p. 187).
150. v (Remembrances, p. 179).