Historical Context: Medicine

“My Lady Bountiful is one of the best of women. Her last husband, Sir Charles Bountiful, left her worth a thousand pounds a year; and, I believe, she lays out half on’t in charitable uses for the good of her neighbours. She cures rheumatisms, ruptures, and broken shins in men; green-sickness, obstructions, and fits of the mother in women; the king’s evil, chin-cough, and chilblains in children; in short, she has cured more people in and about Lichfield within ten years than the doctors have killed in twenty.”
-Boniface, Act One-

By twenty-first-century standards, eighteenth-century remedies and medical practice might be considered crude, to say the least. Doctors dabbled in all manner of dubious cures, often basing prescriptions on shaky conclusions and long-standing assumptions, and supposed remedies could be downright dangerous. Practitioners need not have held a license or any particularly keen knowledge, and competent doctors could thus be hard to find. Indeed, a search for any doctor at all might prove trying, for hospitals were comparative rarities even in London, and physicians gravitated toward treating the wealthy. Country-dwellers and those with little money thus found themselves obliged to fall back on their own resources and traditional cures, unless charitably concerned figures of Lady Bountiful’s stripe stepped in to lend a hand without charging an arm and a leg.

The following excerpts give some taste of early-eighteenth-century cures, and have been taken from a publication offered for the benefit of "those who are remote from better Advice" (from the preface), offering tips and remedies perhaps not too far removed from those known and employed by the philanthropic Lady Bountiful.


SELECTED EXCERPTS

The Pultis, says he, relaxeth the Pores, and maketh the humour to exhale.
The Fomentation calleth forth the humour by Vapours, but yet in regard if the way made by the Pultis, draweth gentlie, and therefore draweth the humours out, and doth draw no more to it, for it is a gentle Fomentation, and hath withal a mixture (though very little) of some stupefactive.
The Plaister is an astringent Plaister, which repelleth a new humour from falling. The Pultis alone would make the part more soft, and weak, and apter to take the defluction, and impression of the humour. The Fomentation alone, if it were too weak without way made by the Pultis, would draw furth little; If too strong, it would draw to the part, as well as draw from it. The Plaister alone, would pen the humour already contained in the part, and so exasperate it, at well as forbid the new humour. Therefore they must be all taken in order, as said is: The Pultis is to be laid too for two or three hours. The Fomentation for a quarter of an hour, and somewhat longer, being used hot, and seven or eight time repeated. The Plaister to continue on still till the part be confirmed.
-The Country Physician, 1701 (p. 57-8)

Take a Pint of Strong Ale, boyle it in, till it come to the consistence of an Oyntment, with which you may Anoint the part affected.
-The Country Physician, 1701 (p. 21, recipe “For Aches and Sores")

Take green Wormwood, and stamp it with the white of an Egg, beaten into Water, and lay it over the Eyes, when you go to Bed, tying the same with a cloath.
-The Country Physician, 1701 (p. 24, recipe “For Redness of the Eyes”)



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