Even by the eighteen the century, illness was not regarded as a
circumstance which necessarily required much positive action.
There remained the notion that it was imposed by God, and it was
largely a matter of waiting until the affliction was removed.
Self help was the first resort, and the main care of the sick came from
within the family circle. Treatment was based on traditional home-
made remedies passed down from mother to daughter. The houses of
the wealthy still maintained physic gardens, and Flora Thompson
tells us that as late as the 1870s, the village women of Juniper Hill,
cultivated corners of their gardens with herbs and made their own
therapeutic drinks:
‘peppermint, pennyroyal, horehound, camomile, tansy, balm,
and rue for physic. They made a great deal of camomile tea which
they drank to ward off colds, to soothe the nerves, and as a general
tonic. The horehound was used with honey in a preparation for sore
throats, and colds on the chest...and the women had a private use for
pennyroyal. As well as garden herbs, still in general use, some of the
older women used wild ones, which they gathered in their season and
dried. But the knowledge and use of them was dying out.’
Country law and recipes for cures were part of everyday
conversation. In Dagenham, in 1822, John Prior asked the Overseers
for relief’ as his arches (of his feet) were so bad’ and was told by Mr
Britain that he had heard that threshing with nettles would cure
rheumatism.
Old medical recipes often appeared in parish registers such as the one
left by Thomas Gilbey, vicar of St Mildred’s, Tenterden, in Kent
(1701-51) as a prophylactic against the plague. Private receipt books
were compiled by the literate, and medicinal remedies were part of a
body of household knowledge which included cures relating to both
human and animal diseases. Bassom, an Essex plumber, even wrote
them down at the end of his account books for 1807-11. Documents
relating to the Convent of the Holy Sepulchre, at Boreham, include a
specific medical book with general cures, and medicines prescribed
at various times for the community.
Household manuals were published such as The General Receipt
Book or Oracle ofKnowledge (1825) which covered ‘every branch of
science’ including practical household advice and medicine, while
publications of Wesley’s Primitive Physick (1741) and Buchan’s
Domestic Medicine (1769) ran into many editions.
For those who chose to use them, mainly the poor, there were
supernatural aids to be invoked. Belief in the curative power of the
Medieval Church had survived the break with Rome, and alongside
petitionary prayer, debased versions of Catholic prayers were used as
charms, and the invocation of the Divine was incorporated into the
incantations of ‘cunning’ mean and women. Faith in magical cures
lingered on into the nineteenth century (and probably beyond). In
1856, it was noted that in Lincolnshire:
‘Those who are not in daily intercourse with the peasantry
can hardly be made to believe or comprehend the hold that
charms, witchcraft, wise men and other like relics of heathendom
have upon the people.’
A wide range of innovative patent and proprietary medicines and
prescriptions were to be had from the chemists and druggists, and
there were few aids to ‘health’ that could not be furnished by quacks
selling their wares at fairs and markets, or by public advertisement.
Apart from the rich who could afford the services of a physician from
a town, medical care was available from men and women who had
learned their skills from their forebears and who practised medicine
alongside their usual daily occupations – apothecaries, herbalists,
bonesetters, blood-letters, cutters of the (kidney) stone, and the like –
and who had had no formal education. Some had no medical training
at all. A Presbyterian minister, John Clegg (1679-1755), practised
medicine to feed his family, and a farmer. George Winter who, by
chance inheritance of his uncle’s medical manuscripts and textbooks,
treated the poor free of charge three days a week and bore a
remarkable similarity to Mary Russell Mitford’s village ‘doctor’ of
the 1820s, Dr Chubb:
‘inventor and compounder of medicines, bleeder, shaver, and
physician of man and beast...His skill he had...inherited from his
aunt Bridget, who was herself the first practitioner of the day, the
wise woman of the village, and bequeathed to this her favourite
nephew her blessing, Culpeper’s herbal, a famous salve for
chilblains, and a still,’
Women were traditionally the backbone of medical care. They were
the ‘wise women’ who were called in to assist in childbirth, illness,
and the last stages of life. Although increasing displaced by
professional practitioners, many men and women versed in
traditional remedies continued to practise, like Elizabeth’s Gaskell’s
country-born Alice Wilson, who :
’In addition to her invaluable qualities as a sick nurse... added a
considerable knowledge of hedge and field simples much used by the
poor.’
.. A scathing observation by William Farr, the Registrar General, in
1877, suggests that despite the inroads of ‘orthodox ‘ medicine,
traditional medicine was alive and well, and had many takers:
‘a considerable number of people die without the attention of a
qualified medical man...and hundreds and thousands are treated by
quacks, ignorant midwives, unqualified attendants, and chemists and
druggists.’
The fact that most professional medical men could offer little better
hope of a cure than the traditionalists is another story.