As long as we’ve opened up the old medicine cabinet, let’s talk about some of the fiendish cures of the past. Christi Phillips, author of The Devlin Diary, a haunting and mysterious tale set partially in 17th Century London, shares some of her favorites.
“Seventeenth century medicines were roughly divided up into two types: ‘simples,’ medicines of only one ingredient, or ‘compounds,’ which had numerous ingredients that might include herbs, flowers, bark, roots, insects, animal parts, metals, salts or minerals. Both simples and compounds could be made into syrups, powders, pills, oils, ointments or plasters. Most physicians prescribed a dizzying array of simples and compounds for any given complaint, along with emetics (medicines that induced vomiting), bleeding (the skill was in deciding where the patient should be bled from), and purging (by enemas or laxatives).
So—the answers are not quite so simple as one ‘ingredient’ for one disease—physicians and apothecaries would have been out of a job if it were so easy! There were so many things that a doctor had to consider: which of the humors was out of balance, whether the patient had been exposed to any “noxious vapors,” and, of course, the position of the planets, since the heavenly bodies regulated the humors and each part of the body, along with medicines and everything else on earth.”
Here are a few remedies plucked verbatim from Nicolas Culpeper’s Complete Herbal and English Physician, originally published in 1653. Everything in parentheses is Christi’s.
Parts of living creatures and excrements:
And a few from “The Admirable Secrets of Physick and Chyrurgery” – Thomas Palmer, originally published in 1696:
(to cure the) Biting of Venomous Beasts:
(to cure) Cramp:
Madness. How cured
About The Devlin Diary:
When handsome but venal Professor Derek Goodman is found slain clutching a page of a coded diary by 17th-century physician Hannah Devlin, Clare Donavan, a temporary lecturer at Cambridge’s Trinity College, and her sometimes boyfriend, Cambridge fellow Andrew Kent, set out to solve a mystery that takes these literary detectives and the reader back to 17th Century London. Scheming academics in this century and scheming courtiers in a century long past muddy the waters, quite literally at times, as Clare and Andrew untangle a web of intrigue. The historical detail is fascinating. Add well drawn characters that pack an emotional wallop, a circuitous plot that mystifies until the final denouement and you have a tremendous read.
—Erin Orison, DEAD LOVE/The Daily Slice