The History of Domestic Plant Medicine E-Book

Gabrielle Hatfield

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 363

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1999

Beschreibung

The debt medicine owes to botany is not commonly appreciated. In the past, medicine relied almost entirely on plants, and even today, many western medicines are plant derived. Despite this, historians have largely neglected the study of domestic medicine, practised by the ordinary person and passed down through generations, in favour of 'official medicine'. The History of Domestic Plant Medicine brings together manuscripts, letters, diaries, personal oral interviews and other primary evidence to produce a detailed picture of the medicinal use of native plants in Britain from 1700 to the present day. Recording for posterity this neglected aspect of our heritage, it is a valuable contribution to the study of the folklore of modern Britain and a fascinating piece of social history.

Leseprobe

Farm buildings in Suffolk, from an album possibly by Clutterbuck. (© Norfolk Rural Life Museum)

Front cover images: Nicholas Culpeper, The Complete Herbal (1842).

(Royal College of Physicians, London/Wellcome Collection)

First published 1999

This paperback edition first published 2022

The History Press

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www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Gabrielle Hatfield, 1999, 2022

The right of Gabrielle Hatfield to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

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ISBN 978 0 75249 516 3

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CONTENTS

Preface to the New Edition

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Picture Credits

Introduction

1   Plant Medicine in Britain

2   What Do We Know about Country Remedies?

3   Simple Plant Remedies: Characteristics of Domestic Plant Medicine

4   The People Themselves: The Users of Domestic Medicine

5   Magic and Medicine

6   Warts and All

7   Hed gerow or Herb Patch: Sources of Plants used in Domestic Medicine

8   Old Cures, New Healing: The Effectiveness of Plant Remedies

Appendix: Plants used in the Twentieth Century for Treating Warts

Notes

Bibliography

PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION

In the twenty-three years since the publication of this book, nearly all the people in East Anglia and throughout the country who shared their knowledge of plant remedies with me have died and, as far as I know, they had not passed on these remedies to others. I feel very fortunate to have had access to these last vestiges of country remedies. Today, passing through the villages and hamlets where these people lived, I reflect on how hard their lives were, contending with sometimes grinding poverty and no access to medical care, at least when they were children.

I remember a visit to an old lady who lived in a small, crooked cottage on a hillock in a small rural common. In her front garden there was a well, with watercress growing out of the top. Innumerable cats were prowling around and, when I approached the front door, some wound their way around my legs. It seemed like the beginning of a children’s fairy tale.

But the story of the old lady’s childhood was a nightmare, not a fairy story. She eventually escaped a cruel upbringing when she inherited the cottage from an aunt and came to live in it. The lady told me that her aunt knew the uses of every wild plant on the common, but that she only remembered a few – one was the use of vervain (Verbena officinalis) for sunburn. I asked her what she did if her cats were ill. ‘Oh, I give them comfrey. If the hens are looking poorly, I give them comfrey; if the geese aren’t laying, I give them comfrey,’ she replied. When I left, she insisted on giving me a large bunch of watercress and two enormous white goose eggs.

Nowadays, as fewer and fewer of our large population have good access to the countryside and less and less of the countryside remains unpolluted, it would be hard to have such self-reliance, even if we wanted it. Yet these human stories from the recent past hold valuable lessons for us still today. We are beginning to realise that it is not necessary to travel to the rainforest for lost medicinal remedies; many of our own native plants will repay pharmacological studies. Such studies are difficult and expensive, but nevertheless will prove worthwhile, and vestiges of knowledge of their historical usage can be used as pointers to those species that may prove especially beneficial.

And maybe, just maybe, we could all benefit from practising a little more of the self-reliance that was forced upon the rural poor in the past. Perhaps, we could then be less dependent on our over-stretched NHS.

Gabrielle Hatfield, 2022

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Frontispiece

Farm buildings in Suffolk

  1.

Common mallow Malva sylvestris

  2.

Piglets foraging at Wood Farm, Saxthorpe, in the 1930s

  3.

Badmonnie Meum athamanticum

  4.

Comfrey Symphytum officinale

  5.

Pilewort, lesser celandine Ranunculus ficaria

  6.

Periwinkle Vinca minor

  7.

Mistletoe Viscum album

  8.

Pennyroyal Mentha pulegium

  9.

Goosegrass, cleavers Galium aparine

10.

Harvest workers at Brampton Hall Farm

11.

Coltsfoot Tussilago farfara

12.

Houseleek Sempervivum tectorum

13.

Elecampane, horseheal Inula helenium

14.

Shepherd’s purse Capsella bursa-pastoris

15.

Devil’s bit scabious Succisa pratensis

16.

Juniper Juniperus communis

17.

Betony Stachys officinalis

18.

Greater plantain Plantago major

19.

Elder Sambucus nigra

20.

Mugwort Artemisia vulgaris

21.

Poppy Papaver rhoeas

22.

Gladden, stinking iris Iris foetidissima

23.

Horseradish Armoracia rusticana

24.

Foxglove Digitalis purpurea

25.

Vervain Verbena officinalis

26.

Ground ivy Glechoma hederacea

27.

Groundsel Senecio vulgaris

28.

Henbane Hyoscyamus niger

29.

Adam Donald, prophet of Bethelnie, Aberdeenshire (1703–80)

30.

Janet Bell, ‘apothecary’, of Elsrickle, Lanarkshire

31.

Good King Henry Chenopodium bonus-henricus

32.

Saffron Crocus sativus

33.

Golden rod Solidago virgaurea

34.

Greater celandine Chelidonium majus

35.

Timothy grass Phleum pratense

36.

Miss Mary Alcock of Sculthorpe, Fakenham.

37.

Scurvy grass Cochlearia officinalis

38.

Eyebright Euphrasia sp.

39.

Hedge woundwort Stachys sylvatica

40.

Figwort Scrophularia sp.

41.

Tormentil Potentilla erecta

42.

Chamomile Chamaemelum nobile

43.

St John’s wort Hypericum perforatum

44.

Yew Taxus baccata

45.

Stinging nettle Urtica dioica

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to the Author’s Foundation for financial support when I began this book; to the Wingate Trust for a two-year Scholarship, and for their help and encouragement; to librarians and archivists, especially in Edinburgh and Norwich, for their patient help over many years; to Elizabeth Stratton, archivist at the John Innes Centre, for her help with the illustrations. I would like to thank the numerous individuals who have shared their memories and knowledge with me.

The Rudyard Kipling quotation from Rewards and Fairies (p. 15) is reproduced by permission of A.P. Watt on behalf of the National Trust, and extracts from A Countryman’s Day Book are reproduced by permission of J.M. Dent/The Orion Publishing Group Ltd.

Finally, I wish to thank my publishers for their help, support and encouragement, and John, Amanda, Sarah, Clare and Jonathan for their love and patience and for keeping my sense of humour alive.

PICTURE CREDITS

I am grateful to the Biggar Museum Trust for permission to reproduce the photograph on page 181 (Janet Bell). The illustration on page 178 (Adam of Bethelnie) is reproduced by Permission of the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland. I would like to thank Stella Ross-Craig, the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, and the John Innes Foundation Historical Collections for the plant illustrations.

Common mallow (Malva sylvestris), from Stella Ross-Craig, Drawings of British Plants. (By kind permission of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew/photograph courtesy of John Innes Foundation Historical Collections)

INTRODUCTION

Anything green that grew out of the mould

Was an excellent herb to our fathers of old.

Rewards and FairiesRudyard Kipling

The story I wish to tell in this book concerns the use in Britain of everyday plants for treating everyday ailments, and it is the history of self-help rather than of official medicine. For early man, plants were the most obvious source of food, and their use in treating illnesses was probably discovered incidentally. Such discoveries would have obvious importance, and would be passed down from one generation to the next. Once written records began, some of this knowledge began to be recorded, but such recording was, by definition, done by the educated sector of society. The ordinary person would continue to use the knowledge passed down to him orally from his forebears. Little by way of written information would have filtered through to the mass of society. For this reason, a study of the history of medicine based on written records must be skewed heavily in favour of the medicine preached and practised by the educational elite. This book is an attempt to redress the balance, and to give some account of the ordinary do-it-yourself medicine practised by the ordinary person in Britain.

Yet if there is no written record of what is primarily an oral tradition, how can we hope to reconstruct the humble home medicine of the past? We have to rely on fragments of information available in poetry, proverbs, songs and ballads, all of them products of oral traditions. In addition, we can obtain snippets of information from the writings of the literate, on the occasions on which they refer to the practices of their uneducated countrymen. Another source of information may come as more of a surprise. It is still possible, though only just, to obtain information from country people in Britain concerning plant remedies used by them within living memory. Some of these remedies show a quite astonishing story of continuity through the generations. An example will illustrate this. While talking to a man in his sixties, now resident in Norfolk, it emerged that he was brought up in Scotland by his elderly grandmother, herself a great believer in simple plant remedies. He vividly remembered stories she had told him as a child of her own great-grandmother, whose family survived unscathed a fever that wiped out most of her village. The explanation given was that the house was ‘all hung about with onions’, and onions were also used as food. The outbreak of fever must have occurred some time during the eighteenth century, yet this story was being told as vividly as if it were a recent occurrence. Moreover, the message of eating onions to combat infection was still very firmly practised in the family, as indeed it is in many areas of Britain. Incidentally, this use of onions is now being vindicated by modern pharmacology.

Allowing for poetic exaggeration, Rudyard Kipling’s claim quoted at the beginning of this introduction was probably quite accurate. The word ‘herb’, although in botanical terms restricted to those green plants which die down in the winter, has in the past been used to signify all those plants useful to man, and it is in this broad sense that the term will be used throughout this book. In the past, herbs have for instance been used in food, perfumery, cosmetics, preservation of food and of the dead, as well as in medicine and contraception. Plants were the most obvious food source for early man, and in the days of pre-history their use in food and medicine were probably indistinguishable at first. Gradually it would have been found that certain food plants had medicinal properties, and trivial daily ailments would have been self-treated. As the recognition of serious illness began, the need for healers arose. Arguably, man used to self-treat with plants only the less serious and less mysterious illnesses, and these were treated by common-sense use of plants empirically found to be effective. However, desperate diseases need desperate remedies. The distinction must always have been apparent between, for example, accidental injury and more mysterious progressive disease such as TB or cancer. This distinction may have given rise to the need for healers; and the lore, myth, mystery and superstition so often quoted as part of traditional medicine may in fact have arisen not around self-medication with plants but around the healers and their healing rituals. This idea is discussed in the following chapters.

The history of domestic medicine in Britain has been largely ignored, apart from the Victorian and somewhat patronizing account by W.G. Black.1 Much has been written about the recorded plant medicines of the herbals, and of the herbalists, but these records omit some of the everyday plant medicines used by our forebears. The subject matter of this book is an account of a neglected part of our national heritage, and as such has its own intrinsic interest. The use of our common native British plants in everyday home medicine is now almost obsolete: it is a matter of urgency to record the knowledge of such plant usage for posterity. The distilled wisdom of the centuries is something that we should proudly preserve, rather than patronizingly dismiss. There is an urgent need to conserve such knowledge of plant usage, before, like the rainforest, it has disappeared irrevocably. It is hoped that this book might provide some pointers to serious students of ethnobotany, and lead to the thorough investigation of more of our native British plants, and to the rediscovery of some of their forgotten medicinal properties.

Piglets foraging around the stacks at Wood farm, Saxthorpe, in the 1930s. (© Norfolk Rural Life Museum)

1

PLANT MEDICINE IN BRITAIN

Domestic plant medicine represents the home survival kit. Built up over the centuries, through the daily life of ordinary country people, it has been preserved with remarkable accuracy from one generation to the next. Many human discoveries about the natural world are remarkable. The knowledge of plant medicines must rank as one of the most important in terms of survival of the species. How was this knowledge gained? Was it all empirical, or did our forebears possess a greater instinctive knowledge of food and medicines, akin to that still seen in animals? Horses and cattle will seek out particular plants to eat when they are ill; domestic dogs eat grass to make themselves sick when they have stomach problems. Arthur Stanley Broome, recalling his working days in Norfolk, tells us:

On Saturday mornings in the springtime, I have been in charge of a flock of ewes and lambs grazing the roadside banks and fences. The herbs the ewes ate were considered a great benefit to their health and of medical benefit too to help them get over lambing quickly.1

One elderly Norfolk man who was a shepherd all his working days told me how sheep normally avoid eating ivy (Hedera helix) leaves, but will seek these out if they are ill. If there was no ivy available in their field, he would offer them a bunch: ‘If a sheep won’t eat ivy, you may as well cut its throat.’2

Ewart Evans reported the observation of a Suffolk horseman that horses seek out the bark of certain trees when they are ill: ‘They whoolly liked to eat some trees. I’d watch ’em going to the hedge and see what trees they’d stop at. Some of my horses used to strip the bark off an oak and some would take to the ellum. Chance times I used to give ’em some of the bark grated up in their bait. It used to make their coats shine like satin.’3 A Norfolk countryman observed that, ‘if a bed of nettles in the corner of a meadow were mown and left lying for twenty-four hours, horses would eat the nettles eagerly, and benefit from them as from a tonic medicine.’4 Recent work in Dorset suggests that Amazonian woolly monkeys, even in captivity, seek out the most appropriate herbs from those available to treat their own ailments.5

Many people are familiar with the spring-time craving for fresh fruit and salad, which in physiological terms makes good sense; during a long winter, it is easy to become short of vitamin C. Possibly the strange food cravings experienced by many women during pregnancy fall into the category of vestiges of an earlier more strongly developed knowledge of the food and tonic value of plants. Such knowledge was handed down orally from one generation to the next, to become part of that precious commodity, common sense. Plant remedies were modified and ‘honed’ by experience: they had to be accurately remembered and passed on, since otherwise toxic plants, or toxic parts of plants, could have been used with very serious effects. In the eighteenth-century records of the Presbytery of Peebles there is an account of a murder case brought before the Kirk session. Isobel F. was accused of murdering her husband, by doctoring his ale:

She denied everything, except that she sent to the gardener’s wife at Linton for some herbs, viz. Badmonnie (Meum athamanticum) and fumitory (Fumaria sp.) and thereafter implored her aunt, Mary F., to go to Ingistone for the herbs or any other place where she may get them, and that she brought them from Dolphinton. But she had no bad dealing in seeking them, but was advised that they were proper for her condition’ [she was pregnant]. Will Gray his wife said that Isobel sent to her for badmonnie, but she said she had it not.6

Luckily for Isobel, the case was considered unproven.

This story illustrates the fact that there was a general awareness of the misuse as well as the use of herbs in medicine. Although it was rarely written down, even in relatively recent times, common knowledge of plant medicines must have been accurate to avoid catastrophes. An interesting example of this is provided by comfrey (Symphytum officinale), a plant used medicinally since the days of the ancient Greeks. In very recent times, doubt has been cast upon the safety of its use. Substances toxic to the liver have been identified in the leaves, and the popular press has made much of the dangers of this traditional plant remedy. What is of great interest is that traditionally the root, and not the leaves, of this plant was used in plant medicine. When I mentioned the use of a tea made from the leaves of comfrey to a Romany friend, he was scandalized that anyone would use the leaves; the root alone was safe to use, and this (to him) was common knowledge, far preceding in time the modern pharmacological analysis. Used in its traditional way, this remedy is perfectly safe, but modern ‘secondary’ use of the plant was inaccurate. The common-sense approach to plant medicine, used as part of people’s everyday lives, included an awareness of which parts of a plant it was safe to use. People did not regard this as specialist information, but took it for granted as common knowledge.

Badmonnie (Meum athamanticum), from Stella Ross-Craig, Drawings of British Plants. (By kind permission of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew/photograph courtesy of John Innes Foundation Historical Collections)

For this reason, when I was collecting data on twentieth-century plant remedies, many people initially disclaimed any knowledge of the subject. If, however, I asked, ‘What did your mother do for you when you were ill as a child’, very often a great deal of information emerged. This is in no way a denigration of its value, more a reflection of how essential a part this knowledge played in people’s lives. Clifford Geertz has defined common sense as ‘a loosely connected body of belief and judgement, rather than just what anybody properly put together cannot help but think’.7

It is, he suggests, more than a recognition of things as they are, it involves ‘how to deal with a world in which such things obtain’.8 Before the advent of medicine as a profession in this country, a working knowledge of plant medicines was, quite literally, a vital part of this body of common sense. The great anthropologist Evans-Pritchard’s description of the Azande could equally well be applied to the country people of Britain, at least up to the present century. They ‘have a sound working knowledge of nature in so far as it concerns their welfare … It is true that their knowledge is empirical and incomplete and that it is not transmitted by any systematic teaching but is handed over from one generation to another slowly and casually during childhood and early manhood, yet it suffices for their everyday tasks and seasonal pursuits.’9

Comfrey (Symphytum officinale), from Sowerby’s English Botany. (Photograph courtesy of John Innes Foundation Historical Collections)

Knowledge of domestic medicine was handed down orally and, even after the invention of printing and the rise of literacy, very little of it was ever written down: by definition, it is knowledge used by the least literate. Yet oral testimony can be remarkably accurate, sometimes more so than the written word, which is subject to copyists’ errors, misinterpretation and misrepresentation. Too often a writer has a point to make and will be selective in the information he uses to illustrate that point. Oral testimony may be highly accurate, but it rarely provides a complete picture for posterity; as the generation which used a particular knowledge dies off, so that knowledge dies too unless passed on to the next generation, or recorded in some way. I have frequently come across fragmentary knowledge of twentieth-century plant remedies; someone may remember a particular plant being used, but cannot recall how it was used; another may remember how to make a remedy, but cannot recall what it was a remedy for. This process accelerates as soon as a particular remedy is no longer in current use.

There is no motivation for the users of domestic medicine to record their remedies in writing. What few records there are on the subject have usually been written by people with no direct experience of country remedies. Such writing tends to treat fragments of information as curios, of a rather quaint nature, to be collected together like a collection of dried butterflies. This not only removes the information from its context, it also tends to lead to a condescending attitude towards the users of such remedies.

The very word ‘folk’ has come to have a patronizing ring to it, and too often accounts of folk medicine concentrate on the bizarre and the fanciful. Taken out of context, and sometimes even quoted quite wrongly, this has built up a picture of folk medicine as a collection of odd anachronistic rituals, practised by the ignorant and superstitious. In reality, domestic medicine was a necessary tool for survival, and still is in many countries. It represents the essence of plant wisdom of many centuries, and it is our loss if we dismiss this wisdom too lightly.

The reasons for the lack of written records of domestic medicine were simply that there was no need to write down such common knowledge, and its practitioners often could not read or write. Simply because of this, their memory was much more retentive than is ours today. It is well known that the less an ability is used, the less efficiently it functions. Today we are so used to depending on the written word that there is no strong motivation for committing large tracts of information to memory. In the past, country people were more at one with their surroundings than we are today. Many could tell the time very accurately without a watch, and predict the weather without listening to radio forecasts or recording pressure changes. The use of plants for medicine as well as for food was part of this greater attunement with the environment.

In order to remember which plant was used for which ailment, it seems likely that a system of mnemonics was developed. It was found that lesser celandine (Ranunculus ficaria) relieved piles; the tuberous roots look vaguely like piles, so as well as giving the name pilewort to the plant, the bumpy roots could serve as a mnemonic. This seems to me a much more convincing explanation of many of our common plant names than the so-called ‘doctrine of signatures’. This famous doctrine was first proposed by Paracelsus in the sixteenth century. It is highly significant that he was himself a physician; like all the literate men of his day, he wrote at several removes from the ordinary common people and their ordinary daily life and ills. He suggested that every plant was ‘marked’ with its own medical use, resembling either the part of the body to which it should be applied or the symptoms of the disease which it could cure. This so-called doctrine of signatures was expounded by various seventeenth-century English herbalists, such as William Coles and Nicholas Culpeper.10

Pilewort, lesser celandine (Ranunculus ficaria), from Sowerby’s English Botany. (Photograph courtesy of John Innes Foundation Historical Collections)

Once committed to print, information takes on an authority which it does not always deserve. An anecdote from Norfolk will serve to illustrate this. Jack was born in 1900, and all his working days he led a shire horse stallion around the farms of Norfolk to serve the mares. He spent his life very largely with his horse, often sleeping alongside it in a barn. A local farmer, knowing of my interest in old remedies, had lent me an eighteenth-century book on farriery, and in this I had read that it was customary, in order to ensure that the mare fell pregnant, to beat her with a bunch of stinging nettles (Urtica dioica) before the stallion arrived. I was curious to know whether this practice survived into Jack’s lifetime.

I felt shy and awkward with Jack, and foolish because I found it difficult to understand his very strong Norfolk accent and vocabulary. I told him of what I had read in the old book on farriery. His whole face creased up with laughter, and he laughed until the tears made runnels down his grubby face. When he had recovered sufficiently to talk, he told me, ‘They books, they get it all wrong! You beat the mare after the stallion has been!’ (which of course, in physiological terms makes a lot more sense).11

The doctrine of signatures may represent another prime example of a case where the books got it wrong! Might it not be the case that Paracelsus, and others following his written lead, misinterpreted an already well-established and well-used system of mnemonics, well known to the country people who actually made up and used medicines from everyday plants? The berberis (Berberis sp.) was not good for jaundice because it had yellow bark: its yellowness, like a jaundiced complexion, was a feature of the plant by which to remember its medical use. Once the doctrine of signatures was invented by the literate class, it became embroidered and might well have led to some misuses of plants; so that, by extension, all yellow plants might be thought good for jaundice. This idea is explored further in Chapter 5.

Domestic medicine was a common-sense collection of first aid worked out by instinct, by observation of animals and by trial and error, and, at least until the advent of printing, preserved entirely by word of mouth. With the advent of printing came an entirely new chapter in the history of plant medicine. Once committed to print, whether accurate or not, one particular remedy would be preserved and copied from one century to the next. As long as remedies were actually in use, there was little danger of their becoming inaccurate; once they fell into disuse, and particularly once they appeared as reported remedies in print, the situation became very different, and their accuracy slumped.

Any error once appearing in print has a tendency to be repeated almost indefinitely. Since the written herbals were available only to the privileged few who could read and write and afford to buy them, a divergence began between the written herbal medicine of the elite and the ordinary grassroots medicine of the majority of country people. Injected into the written record of herbal medicine was the current ‘official’ medical thinking of the day, as well as ideas gathered from abroad. As this process continued, herbal medicine as recorded in the literature diverged further and further from the orally transmitted traditions of country medicine. While there was occasional input from domestic medicine into ‘official’ medicine, there was probably very little input in the other direction, from official to traditional.

Oddly, as Oliver Wendell Holmes had pointed out, official medicine has always been strangely reluctant to acknowledge its debt to domestic medicine. As a result of this attitude, there is no doubt that much valuable information has been and continues to be lost. Yet the ‘discoveries’, or strictly re-discoveries, made in this way have been profoundly significant:

It [medicine] learned from a monk how to use antimony, from a Jesuit how to cure agues, from a friar how to cut for stone, from a soldier how to treat gout, from a sailor how to keep off scurvy, from a postmaster how to sound the Eustachian tube, from a dairymaid how to prevent smallpox, and from an old market-woman how to catch the itch-insect.12

A striking example of an instance where domestic medicine could have helped orthodox medicine is to be found in the manuscript of the Gunton Household Book, a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century kitchen book kept by members of the Harbord family. Anyone who has worked with archives will know the feeling of awe and excitement they can engender. The Gunton Household Book is kept in the church of St Peter Mancroft, in Norwich. The first time I opened it, the sunlight was shining through the stained-glass windows on to the faded ink, and it was with a feeling of privilege that I turned the pages and familiarized myself with the handwriting of successive women of the Harbord family. For several years in the 1970s, I had worked in cancer research, and it was a moving and humbling experience to come across this early eighteenth-century remedy:

For a sore brest yt is Painfull knotted and yet white and hard. Take flax … and upon it … ye herb Periwinkle, and fume it over frankincense and apply it hot morning and evening renew it as ye herb dryes away continue this for some time and it will take ye pain quite away and disperse ye knots Prov’d by Mrs Bacon of Ipswich.13

Periwinkle belongs to the genus Vinca, which has now given its name to the vinca-alkaloids which have played such a major role in the treatment of many malignancies, and have led to the transformation in treatment of childhood leukaemia. The actual species of periwinkle used in extraction of modern vinca-alkaloids is the Madagascar periwinkle (Vinca rosea, now called Catharanthus roseus), but the common periwinkle (Vinca minor) has also yielded some interesting compounds currently used in treatment of arteriosclerosis and certain types of dementia. Had this group of plants come to the notice of the medical profession earlier, how many lives might have been saved?

What is the basis of the undeniable reluctance of the medical profession either to acknowledge its debt to ‘popular’ medicine or to take plant medicines seriously enough to investigate them thoroughly? This is a complex and interesting subject, which will be explored further in the coming chapters. Suffice it to say here that there are probably two main reasons for this reluctance. The first is a historical one: with the so-called ‘rationalization’ of medicine in the eighteenth century, the medical profession was at pains to distance itself from the non-scientific remedies of the past. The other major reason is a far more subtle one, and concerns the image of the medical profession, both as its practitioners wish themselves to be seen, and as their patients wish to see them.

Domestic medicine, by definition, had no distinct ‘practitioners’. It was a do-it-yourself collection of first aid. However, once individuals gained reputations as healers, they were immediately set apart from the ordinary people, and invested with special powers. We want to have faith in our healers: we want to believe that they possess greater knowledge than we do ourselves. Meanwhile the healers, set apart by their patients, will in many cases foster this image of themselves as being special, possessing extraordinary powers or knowledge. Once this happens, the healers become increasingly motivated to shroud their practice in mystery, magic, or obscure terminology. This in turn sets them still further apart from the people they treat.

Periwinkle (Vinca minor), from Sowerby’s English Botany. (Photograph courtesy of John Innes Foundation Historical Collections)

Another factor in the distancing of healers from those they attempt to treat is the payment factor. In domestic medicine, money very rarely changes hands. Healers, however, have made it their job, and will expect payment in kind or in money. This presupposes that they possess knowledge not owned by those they treat; similarly, the medical professional must not be seen to be using the same old everyday remedies that everyone knows about and takes for granted. The use of Latin by the medical profession (even up to the present time) is an example of this need to emphasize that they have something special to offer, beyond the grasp of the ordinary patient. It is very difficult to find out about the healers who used plant medicine, since they kept no records. Tantalizing glimpses and stories of ‘wise women’ and men abound, but hard facts are difficult to come by, although there are still such healers practising in developing countries. The accounts we do have tend to confirm that, as in the case of the medical profession, once the healers are recognized as experts, they are set apart from the normal run of humanity, and their practice acquires all kinds of ritual, which is quite absent from the ordinary practice of plant medicine. Examples of this will be given in the following chapters.

This book is primarily concerned with the history of rural domestic medicine during the last three centuries, from the time when official and domestic medicine began to part company. Since, as we have seen, the practitioners of domestic plant medicine in Britain during the last three centuries were mostly ordinary, often illiterate, country people, how can we learn about the remedies that they used? Fortunately, although the medical profession was loath to recognize its common ground with the traditional users of plant medicine, such was not the case with the writers of the early herbals. In many of these herbals there are references to remedies learned from private individuals (see Chapter 2). Manuscript diaries and letters and kitchen books belonging to the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are a more problematic source of information concerning the plant remedies that were actually in everyday use. Since only the wealthy landowners kept such kitchen books, it follows naturally that they reflect mainly the medicine of the well-to-do. Occasionally, however, one comes across a reference to a remedy obtained not from a fellow member of the gentry, but from a gardener, or another employee on the estate, or simply quoted as used ‘by the country people’. In this way, the writings of the wealthy can offer glimpses of the domestic medicine of the ordinary people. Thus the diaries of John Clerk of Penicuik (1719–90) record remedies gleaned from the gardener, the flesher (butcher) as well as from fellow landed gentry.14 But on the whole, kitchen books in both England and Scotland record remedies swapped from one wealthy family to another.

As home medicine and orthodox medicine diverged further during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the herbalist emerged as a new alternative, and the history of herbalism is extremely well recorded by Barbara Griggs.15 Suffice it to say here that, as a result of political manoeuvring, the English herbalists were largely forced either underground or abroad, and, as a result, many of the remedies used in British herbalism today have been re-imported from North America. As such, they represent a distillation of a quite separate tradition of plant remedies, many of them using North American rather than native British plants.

It is beyond the scope of this present book to review traditional medicine worldwide. However, much of what is said in this book about British domestic medicine could probably be applied to domestic medicine elsewhere. In general, free, local plants are used, and there is a lack of ritual and superstition surrounding them. These elements begin to creep in only when there are distinct practitioners and patients. An extreme example of this comes from a tribe in a small region of South America. Here, herbal medicine has become an exclusively male domain, so exclusive, in fact, that it is conducted, by the men alone, in a language reserved entirely for herbal medicine, and never taught to the women!16

In general, too much has been made of the link between magic, witchcraft, superstition and plant medicine. The vast majority of British people used plant medicines as ordinary first aid. Once written down, many of the rules for using such plants became distorted. The image of the herb-gatherer only collecting plants at a certain time of the day, and in dark and shady places, has twisted the truth. It was found by experience, and is now being ratified by phytochemistry, that many plant constituents vary in their concentration, depending on the season and the growth conditions of the plant.17 What were empirical observations have been turned by some writers into dark mysterious rituals. For example, much has been made by some folklorists of the customs of carrying acorns, conkers, or potatoes to ward off illness. I would like to suggest that such practices, like many superstitions, are vestiges of an earlier, perfectly sensible, use of the plant. Thus, in the past, remedies were made from potatoes to ease the pain of rheumatism. As the practice was discontinued, only the remnant of the remedy was remembered. Numerous other examples of such vestigial remains of remedies will be quoted in the following pages.

Our present knowledge of domestic medicine is fragmentary, much of it having been lost once the practice of it was discontinued, with few reliable written records. It is to be hoped that what remains will not be falsified further, nor recorded in too patronizing a way for posterity. In our present century, elderly people with such knowledge usually have not passed it on to the next generation, for fear of being laughed at, or simply because they feel such information is not of interest to anyone. (In the past, individuals with a wide knowledge of plant remedies had an even stronger motive for remaining silent; if they made their knowledge too obvious, they could be branded as witches.)

If a particular plant was of major importance in domestic medicine, then rules for its preservation would arise if necessary; the ban on picking certain plants, or bringing them indoors, may have arisen in this way. Every part of the elder tree has been used in plant medicine, and its importance in this area may have a bearing on its being regarded, from the time of the Druids onwards, as sacred. It is still today regarded as unlucky to cut a branch of elder; is this superstition all that is left of an earlier healthy respect for a plant that could help so many human ills? This idea is explored more fully in Chapter 3.

There is a tendency today to regard many things from the past as primitive. If primitive means closer to the natural world, then it should be used as a compliment. Rather than dismissing items of plant lore as quaint reminders of a more ignorant past, they should be seen as clues to an earlier, far more comprehensive knowledge of the use of plants. The area of plant medicine covered in this book is mainly the history of country medicine from the beginning of the eighteenth century onwards. This was a time of dramatic change within official medicine, which became rationalized, with the loss of many formerly used simples, and began to diverge further and further from traditional plant medicine. Before this, the pharmacopoeia for both was similar, and consisted largely of native British plants. As country and official medicine diverged, the gulf between the medicine practised by rich and poor likewise enlarged. For this book, I have gathered the fragmentary evidence of the domestic practice of medicine among the rural poor. Domestic remedies did of course include all kinds of non-plant constituents, such as salt, ink, slugs and snails, urine and spittle (many of which also featured in official medicine, at least until the end of the eighteenth century). But these household remedies, however interesting their story is, are beyond the scope of this book, which deals primarily with plant remedies.

While the early origins of domestic plant medicine cannot be established with certainty, it does seem clear that such knowledge was born out of necessity. Even as recently as the eighteenth century, official medical help was inadequate and too costly to supply the needs of the rural population in Britain. Porter points out that at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Britain’s roads were perhaps in a worse state than when the Romans departed!18 This was another reason why in country areas even those who could afford medical aid would be self-reliant as far as possible. As the century progressed, official medical services became more widely available, at least to those who could afford them. However, for the rural agricultural labourer, life changed little in this respect between 1700 and 1900, and even well into the twentieth century. Tom Higdon, arriving at Burston Village School as a teacher at the turn of the twentieth century, found conditions so bad for the labouring poor that he and his wife soon became instrumental in what became known as the ‘Burston Rebellion’. Higdon described the conditions in poetry, but there was nothing poetic about the suffering and poverty widespread among the families of agricultural labourers:

With tattered shoes the children trudge to school

Along the lanes wet slush and muddy pool, –

Prey to diseases springing from their chills

And to the more preventable of ills

All for the labourer’s lack of means to buy

Clothing to keep his children warm and dry!19

The agricultural labourer was at the bottom of the pile in terms of wage-earning, and this remained true even during the so-called golden age of agriculture in the nineteenth century. The prosperity of landowners and farmers was not shared with the labourer, whose wage remained the lowest in the national economy.20 The basic problems of life – low income, limited food, inadequate housing – were probably similar for the agricultural labourer at the beginning of the eighteenth century to those in the early years of the twentieth century. Survival depended on hard work, luck, and self-reliance. The picture generally painted of rural England during the eighteenth century is usually of a tripartite society consisting of landowners, tenant farmers and landless wage-earners. However, as Armstrong points out, this is an oversimplification. In addition, there were small farmers, especially in the west of the country in counties such as Herefordshire, and for them living conditions may have been even harder than for the cottager. Low prices and enclosure forced many of them out of their farms, while the wealth of the large landowners increased. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the French wars brought an increase in prices of agricultural produce, but with the advent of peace, the labour market was flooded, leading to more hardship. Average earnings for an agricultural labourer sank to a minimum in 1824.

As industry developed, there was increased migration from the countryside to the town. Overall population in both town and country increased, owing in part to a reduction in childhood mortality. As medical services, together with public health, improved in the towns and cities, rural life in many ways remained unaltered. Such medical services as were available in the country continued to be too expensive for the majority of agricultural labourers well into the twentieth century. For the rural labourer, family knowledge of domestic plant medicine must have been instrumental in keeping his animals and his family alive. By definition, there is no written record of his practice of domestic medicine: ‘The labouring poor did not leave their workhouses stashed with documents for historians to work over’.21