Drugs from the Colonies: |
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When the Spanish explorers penetrated Mexico’s advanced civilization, they encountered profoundly sophisticated medical understandings, into which women’s health issues provide but one window of observation. But even in the very different societies of the Caribbean, they had observed developed strategies of herbal medicine. Africans who were kidnapped and transported to the Americas as slaves may well have borne with them botanical and medical understandings that proved useful in their new environments. The sweat lodges of North American Indians held their own fascination for Europeans. Finally, the rising rates of literacy of the middle class in Europe fostered a new range of democratizing self-help books, do-it-yourself guides to medical practice and other subjects. |
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Theodor de Bry. [America. Part IV. German]. Frankfurt a.M.: J. Feyerabend for D. de Bry, 1594. This lavishly illustrated volume contains the translation of part of Girolamo Benzoni’s La historia del Mondo Nuovo, Venice, 1565. Benzoni, who lived in Spain’s West Indian empire, wrote that the indigenous inhabitants of Hispaniola were enslaved to the degree that they collectively chose suicide over continued oppression. Indian women were aware of a root that caused a fetus to miscarry, and used this when they recognized that they could not care for a child. An overdose brought the death of the mother as well. In the left foreground a woman is depicted consuming such a root. |
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Francisco Hernández (1517-1587). De materia medicaNovae Hispaniae Philippi Secundi Hispaniarum ac Indiarum Regis invictissimi iussu collecta. [The Escorial, between 1577 and 1589?] This manuscript codex is the epitome of the study commissioned by Phillip II of Spain and conducted by Dr. Hernández during the years 1570-77, when he collected specimens and recorded and described minerals, flora, fauna, and sites of ethnographic interest. Hernández prepared a massive collection of six volumes of text and ten of illustrations and presented these to the king. Against scientific expectation, Phillip treated these instead as state secrets and turned the material over to a Dr. Nardo Antonio Recchi of Naples, with instructions to extract and summarize the material medica information Hernández had compiled. The book is open to an index page (leaf 222) listing drugs for gynecological procedures, e.g., for a distended uterus, for inducing labor, for the (prohibited) removal of a fetus, etc. |
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Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717). Over de voorteeling en wonderbaerlyke veranderingen der Surinaemsche insecten. Amsterdam: J. Oosterwyk, 1719. The German artist and scientific observer Maria Merian and her daughter traveled to Suriname to live there in a religious community founded by the Labadists, who followed the teachings of a French pietist. In Suriname, oppressed native and African slave women continued to use herbal knowledge passed down from others. Among other plants studied and painted by Merian was the plant used as an abortifacient and poison, known variously as the peacock flower, flos pavonis, etc. (Caesalpinia pulcherrima). Modern evaluation indicates that the plant may be used to induce abortion effectively in the first four months of pregnancy. The flowering plant is used widely for ornamental purposes. Also included in this view is the metamorphosis of a moth, a Merian specialty. |
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Giles-Joseph Descourcelle (d. 1788). Élexir américain, ou Le salut des dames, par rapport à leurs maladies particulières. Chalons: Sombert; Vitry: J. Seneuze; Paris: Saillant & Nyon, 1771. This French physician, a veteran of Saint-Domingue, provides a handy guide to the treatment of gynecological matters and the easing of labor. He built the book around the premise of a remedy that African women on the island prepared themselves from herbs they gathered. |
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John Theobald (d. 1760). Every man his own physician. Philadelphia: Jones, Hoff, & Derrick, 1794. Theobald’s do-it-yourself healing guide was one of a variety of works on popular medicine, generating numerous editions from 1764 to 1800, undertaken by printers in London, Dublin, Wales, Boston, Philadelphia, and Hartford, Connecticut. For intermittent fever, the author recommends a mixture of Peruvian bark, Virginia snakeroot, and salt of wormwood, taken every two hours in a glass of red wine. In severe cases ipecacuanha might be introduced to induce vomiting. For pains after childbirth, he prescribes a scruple of spermaceti, 5 drops of balsam of Peru, and some other ingredients, mixed into a large pill. |
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George Fisher. The American instructor, or The young man’s best companion. Philadelphia: John Dunlap, 1770. Contained within this instructive manual, along with its mathematical and business exercises, scientific definitions, and compact historical and literary guides, is a compressed reprint of John Tennant’s Every man his own doctor. Originally printed at Williamsburg in 1734, the self-help medical guide is presented here to a broader rural public that must in many cases depend on its own self-instruction. Tennant, a Virginia doctor, prescribes ipecacuanha for pleurisy; for colic, he prescribes sassafras tea with snakeroot powder; for the dry gripes, the worst kind of colic, a clyster of tobacco is proposed to open the bowel. He advises against the use of Jesuits’ bark in attenuating menses. For heartburn, one should chew sassafras bark. “Indian physic” (Virginia ipecacuanha) is offered for both palsy and yellow jaundice. A potion of Indian corn is proposed for a stone in the bladder. Other remedial drugs on his list include Indian pepper and sassafras root. |
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The founder of Rhode Island spent much time with the Narraganset Indians and learned much about their customs and beliefs. At the time his study of the Narraganset language was published, Spanish (and some English) printers had already issued long narrative studies of the extensive medical and pharmaceutical understandings of the Aztecs. It is not known whether Williams had heard of these, but it was his impression that the Narragansets had no medical resources but for corn and water. He thought that millions of Indians must die from lack of any medication, and he gave them what little he had. It is possible that his hosts held special knowledge they declined to share with the Englishman, but they freely invited his participation in the sweat-lodge experience, which he reckoned to be a truly healing activity: “Here they sit round these hot stones an houre or more, taking tobacco, discoursing and sweating together, which sweating they use … to purge their bodies, which doubtless is a great meanes of preserving them, and recovering them from diseases, especially from the French disease ….” |
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Johann Adrian Slevogt (1653-1726), praeses; Johann Georg Pilling, respondent. Prolusio inauguralis de publicis utriusque Americae sudatoriis. Jena: Werther Press, 1697. |