Only on cspan3. Next, lori lyn price of tufts school of medicine talks about graded ande remedies used by 17thcentury new england house was. The partnership of his stored old New England Church cohosted. Introducelighted to the immediate and by immediate i think a week, past president of Boston Society who is an old friend who will be introducing our speaker for tonight. [applause] good evening. Welcome to this wonderful program. , all of you, no, each year the partnership has a after series of events september 7. September 7 is the day on which boston, georgetown, and watertown were named and we always commemorate date. We have a series of events each year. This years theme is that medicine and mortality. Im here to tell you it is the most successful charter day we have ever had. Tell me if you have been to other events this year . Would you raise your hand . That is what i thought. This is a wonderful. Excellent. In addition to our fall activities, we have lectures, Reading Group discussions, and toys from april through november. We are an allvolunteer group that cares passionately about telling the forgotten history of boston from 1630 until the revolution. We do have three more programs coming up. Rescheduling the anticipated talk at the old statehouse by dr. David jones. It will be a wonderful closing to this whole theme and we will also have two more tours. About thelot renaissance man. We usually really do mean a man. But tonight, you are going to meet a renaissance woman. Of whath and breadth lori lyn price does for science and history is amazing. First, her day job. She is a master degree in statistics from the ohio state university. She is a faculty appointment at the Tufts University school of medicine. And she is a biostatistician at does Medical Center in named as coauthor and 130 published medical research papers. Her we have the rest of life, which includes work with the partnership of historic boston a hand she just a earned a master of liberal arts and history from the harvard extension school. Work focused on domestic medicine in 17thcentury england. She really is the expert on this area. She is also a professional historian and genealogical speaker and she owns reachingthepast. Co a wonderful sitem that, helps people connect with their ancestors. She is going to help us reach a 17thcentury bostonians and how they cope with illness tonight. Please welcome dr. Lori lyn price. Dr. Prof. Price thank you for having me here. I am delighted to be her. I am a little but horse with a cup at im excited to be here. Bit hoarseittle with a cough, but i am delighted to be here. Have not visited the 18thcentury garden, i invite you to visit. We wanted to have this at the church because when we are talking about herbal remedies of medicine, we are relying heavily on gardens. Herbal,e not entirely based. They had other things they used as well. We were going to go on a tour in the homes. Ed not necessarily by the housewife, although we will be talking a lot about her, but what was used in the home england. T 17thcentury i will rely heavily on recipe books or as they called them back then receipt books. Were all they rage. It was cool to collect them from all your friends, doctors, many that may have had the name like. E king maybe it did not come from the king bed they thought it would work better than what you got from your friend or neighbor. Is mostly in england, but it wouldve been very similar herein new england. So much of what i say will apply to both places. I am going to talk about to recipe books and particular. I will introduce you to them. The first is the Charles Brigham account book. Even though it has a mans name, he may be wrote two pages of accounts. The rest of the 200 or so pages are written by a woman, which is probably typical. It has a mans name that what is written by a woman. The ones i use for my thesis were created by a woman in england in 1650. She died in 1688, she was collecting recipes almost until she died because there was a recipe and there from a book for shed in 1687, 1 b died. One year before she died. Actually 450 recipes but the book was in pretty poor shape when it was donated in the 1970s. So, she also collected culinary recipes which i did not focus on because any recipe book would have both the medical and culinary recipes. Many times they would be interspersed together. She had them separated. And then, after she died, somehow the book made its way over here and came into the brigham family. Three generations of women then added more recipes. I will get to those eventually but not today. Is where the recipe books come from. Recipes, many of the other recipes come from the marshall washington cookbook. Have any of you heard from this cookbook . This cookbook was not Martha Washingtons. She owned it at one time but by the time she owned it it was likely a family heirloom. It was written generations earlier and like many recipe books, passed down through the generations. I should add that both of these books are manuscript books. The Charles Brigham book i am in the process of transcribing but it is not published anywhere and karen has published an annotated addition of the marshall marcia marsha washington cookbook. I will cover the slides and detail and they will be available and they will be available in cspan later. This is a recipe from the brigham account book. It is for coffee or consumption. Respiratoryn any illness. Some of the ingredients are aquanity,le ale, suger. Pane roots, loafe cynamon. , and if you find your stuff still feeling sick, you can have another before dinner. The hells come the husband come the train doctor, the midwife, all of them understood at the same way and this with the foundation made believe. They believed there were four elements in the body and and terms of what im going to focus on, they had hot, cold, wet, and dry. Soyoull europe lot about you will hear a lot about hot, cold, wet, dry. We had ideal balance. It might be different between us but for my body, if i was in the ideal balance i would be healthy. If any of the humors were out of balance, i would be sick. I would have symptoms, headache, fever, all kinds of things that would indicate mike humors were out of balance. They did not believe in this time and distinct illnesses. It is not like i had a specific fever or migraine. I just had a symptom of humors balance. Of we might have the same symptoms that our humors might be out of balance and different ways. There was not a given, said disease. This is called the human arc the theory. Codified in the second century in the common era. Medicineled galenic after him. It could cause humors . It could be a simple chill, emotional upset, i digested milk, unbalanced diet, a change san, ority level, contact with somebody who was sick. You could become much more active or less active which could create an imbalance in the humors. They did understand diseases were contagious and so they did not understand that bugs or germs were being passed. That you were in contact with someone who is sick, that would theirt enough to contain own humors and you could get sick with perhaps the same symptoms. Areerms of diet, today we myplate. Gov which has the ideal balance of meat hotdairy, back then it was and cold and wet and dry. It might not be equal portions, 25 of each, but you would certainly want to have elements of each of these if you are already healthy and wanted to maintain your health. If you are already healthy, you wanted good that had a mix of hot and cold and wet and dry properties. If you are not imbalanced, you would try to eat in balance, he would try to eat some cold. How did they know the child which properties . It was something you would learn growing up. Your mother would teach you if you were a woman and the men would probably pick it up along the way as well. Wereu did not know, there all kinds of resources you could go to, which we will tell you about in a moment. In new england, one might be fish. Cold and wet. If you were to have fish, you had your balanced meal of cold and wet fish. Garlic was also hot and dry. Lemon cucumbers were cold and wet. Beef, lay gums, bread, and ive were called and dry. There were books telling you about the varying degrees of heat or cold. It can be firstdegree or third degree. You could really get into this if you wanted to. Many of you saw the garden out back. The 18thcentury garden. Here are the 17th century gardens. Ipswich which is wonderful. This is part of the garden. This is really part of it. You go there, you will notice it is marked, heres the mint, here is the thyme. They would not have had it marked bad it is just to help assess tourists. Culinary items were often one in the same but somewhere purely culinary or purely medicinal. They also threw things that would help with grew things that would help with dyeing materials. They have many different gardens from different times here. This is half of the garden. The other half is, i could not take the other half of the picture. Now, if i was a woman starting out in my own household, now in charge of taking care of my husbands and kids to come, hopefully my mother would have trained me well but i also would have had a lot of other resources. One of which is recipe books. Wellcomeis from the library in london. They have a wonderful collection manuscript books. Many you can look at it for free, some you have to purchase. Inre are similar collections the United States, not many is good. Goal, to start collecting some of the books that might have some u. S. Specific recipes to expand the database i have. If you are lucky you had a recipe book. With the Charles Brigham book, whoever donated it in the 1970s, they put this wonderful note which is not true but still hannah wasght, that getting married and going to marlborough in 1710, out into the wilderness in the middle of nowhere and so her mother was worried about her and made this recipe book. Not true. Because the recipe book began, most of it was compiled already but somehow she ended up comic could be her mother gave for the recipe book that had already been compiled in then it was passed down through several generations of the family and added to every time. You could, and also, not only a few did not have your recipe book as i mentioned, making recipe books was all the rage so you could start asking your friends, family, doctors, midwives, whoever might have good recipes, you could ask them to start your own collection. A lot of people did that. There were also published books. This is gerards herbal. How many of you are familiar with this . You should become familiar with it. It is a wonderful book published in the late 1800 1500s and captain to the 1600s. You can see on the front there are some wonderful drawings. The version i have is black and white. He has some really nice drawings and along with them he has descriptions of where you can find them, what they look like, what you can use them for. We are going to look at this. A beautiful this is actually in the garden. One of the gardeners here took the picture and shared it with me. I am going to read you what ger ard has to say. He says, foxglove as a purple flowers at most common. The leaves are long. It goes on for another couple of paragraphs. It talks about where you can find it. Grows andxglove Barren Grounds and under hedges almost everywhere. Remember, this is in england. This is where you can find it in england. They flourish in june and july. He gives the name and french. Then the temperature. The hot and dry properties. He says the foxglove in that they are bitter are hot and dry. Yet, are they of no use . Any place in medicine according to the ancients . Keep in mind this was First Published in the 1500s. Not until the 1700s did people realize foxglove was useful for treating cardiac issues. Anotherlpepper was famous person in the time. This was published around. These are two of his books together. He was one of the growing number of people who thought that knowledge should not be held in the hands of the few trained physicians but given to everyone which is really good that we have all of this in terms of, you know, i will read you a short example but most of them are quite detailed. So somebody who wanted to know more could dig into this but much of the knowledge would not have been. People already knew what these medications were used for. They might have known for the most part, if they were hot or dry. More detail at that it was important to get out to the laypeople. A huge1850s there was explosion of publications that were published in england on medicine. So there really was this idea that knowledge should not remain in the hands of the physicians, that it should be spread out. On the other hand, most people already knew what this was, so there is kind of a little tradeoff there. We are going to read about the bouncing bets. He is very detail. His book is about ethics. Really small, double column. He wants to get as much information to you as he can. The roots creep underground. Therein. Joints ronald the outside, yellow with them. Then it goes on and says, and a place that grows wild in many low and went lands, by brooks and the side of running water. The flowers usually under lien septemberand part of before they are spent. In terms of the government and virtues, government is it is governed by astrology. He was a strong believer in astrology. So he talked about with sign it was under in the virtues are what it treats. He says it been us owns it, the country people in diverse places use it to brew and put it on their fingers, hands, and legs when theyre cut to heal them up again. It is diuretic all to provoke yearend and therefore to expel itvol in the kidneys and do singularly good to avoid tropical waters. They extol it to perform an absolute cure of syphilis. More than source for like 10 do. Sarsaparilla can do. Use it for their cut, other people say it is good for provoking urine and we will talk about why you might want to someat later, and then people say it is good for the french pox. Muchof what he has as longer. Books such asre this. This is the english housewife published in 1615. Ofwas on trend through most the 1600s, written by a man, egg and, telling the housewife all of the virtues are characteristics she should have. One is an medicine. That sheit is needed have a physical or medicinal kind of knowledge, how to administer wholesome receipts for the good of health to prevent the first occasion of sickness and to take way the effects and evil of the same when it has made seizure on the body. She is supposed to know a lot about medicine. Enough to prevent illness and her family and when illness enters her family, to take care of it. But he goes on to say, she should not know too much because too much is what the physician should know. So there is a fine line between how much she could know and how much she should not know. Then there is the explosion of literature, medicine in the 16 50s. Leases one of hannah will books. There is one of hannah s book woolley. You might ask, how did they make medicine . There were 13 or 14 apothecaries and boston. Im not sure when they first started. In 1630, when John Winthrop came over, there was someone on board who called himself an apothecary. Not,er he was for real or we do not know. Around the 1700s, there were started to be apothecaries and so apothecaries were nice in that you could go and buy premade medicines. It takes a long time to make medicines. They would also have things you might not be able to grow. Or that you would not have the ingredients to make. Well talk about some of those. I had the experience to learn what it was like to make medicine in the 1600s at a plantation a couple years ago. I went for a workshop and there were just two of us there and we were given a sheet about 10 pages with about 2030 on it and heres the picture, heres what theyre called, heres what they do. In order to make a medicine like that the due in the 1600s, we had to decide what we wanted to treat. We decided we wanted our medicine to treat muscle and joint pain and inflammation. So once we decided on that, we then pick from the list about eight plants, that is how many they said you need. We picked, free, st. Johns wort, marshmallow, rosemary and others. Then we went out into the gardens. This is a picture of me picking from the gardens. We went to the plymouth plantation gardens. None of them grew in all one garden, we had to go to several gardens. We read the whole plant here, we were not going to take the whole plant. We did not use the roots, sometimes you need to but we took the stem, the leaves come the flowers, the seeds, anything else that might be on the stem we would take. And we had to get a lot of it. We filled to big baskets full. We took them back to the workshop and cut them into pieces probably about the size of a quarter of your palm because we wanted them small enough that we could draw out all of the essences. When youre making medicine with goebbels, any botanicals, you want to dry out the medicinal purposes. Many times you are going to make an ointment or sell. The cut them up small enough so we can get as much of the essence as possible and then we put it into a pot with oil and then we left. It took about two hours. There was an intern there so she watched over this. This was the 21st century. It wouldve taken a much longer to do this over a fire but we wanted to let the plant oils soak up the essence or virtues or medicinal properties. A number is done, we no longer needed the plants a week strained it, to the oil, and added beeswax. We made about 20 jars. The jars were probably about this pick. We made 1520 jars. So if you are a housewife and only wanted to make one or two or three you would have to very carefully decide what proportion you needed. We made a a lot. We told we were told it lasted about a year. Oftenhen they did not think in terms of expiration dates so they probably wouldve kept it for much longer as long as it seemed to work. Couple weeks ago i was up in charles town, new hampshire, when they are having an 18thcentury medicine day. I spent a long time talking with a midwife. She had this wonderful collection of all of these things as a midway. Fresh herbs from her garden, fresh plants, dried herbs and plants, teachers, selves, bottles of dried and powdered plants. I asked her, how would they know any longeruld not use it and she was like well, once it does not seem to work. So, there are a few recipes ive seen that do give expiration dates but most of them do not. I also asked her, you have quite the collection, i know your midwife, what would the average woman have . She said, they would have a lot of this stuff but not all of it. It would depend on woman to woman, just like real might have our favorite spices for cooking, they would have their favorite herbs and spices for medicine. It would have as much as they needed. The other types of medicine say might make art she where you tea, where you could use fresh tentacles or herbs. Have auld have fruit, i friend who likes fruitinfused water. In pu