Traditional Medicine in 18th Century Essex

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 of Knowledge (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 877, 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.