How Welsh medicine helped to create America!

How is Welsh medicine linked to the establishment of a global superpower? On the face of it the two don’t appear to have much in common! As an historian of Welsh medical history it’s not often that I can make grandiose claims about Welsh practitioners. One of my colleagues once suggested that Galen was actually a mistranscription and that the supposed Graeco-Roman physician was actually G. Allen from Cardiff. Wales, and not ancient Greece, in his view, was the true seat of medical knowledge. With the subject of this post, however, Wales (and Welsh medicine) can lay claim to an important figure in the early history of the United States – Thomas Wynne of Ysceifiog, Flintshire.

Wynne was born in 1627 in Bron Vadog in the parish of Ysceifiog in North Wales, the son of a freeholder. Details of his early life are sometimes obscure. It seems that his father died when he was 11 and that, sometime after that, and perhaps even affected by it, his religious views began to shift. In the religious turmoil of the 1640s (this was the decade of the English Civil Wars and the ‘world turned upside down) he became increasingly dissatisfied with the poor quality of religious teaching. He felt that those responsible for his spiritual welfare were “of low degree” and had let him down. He was, as he later wrote, spiritually “at the mercy of the wolf”.[1]

Ysceifiog (image available under creative commons licence)

Matters came to a head in the 1650s when he underwent a profound religious experience. As he later wrote: “the heavenly power wounded as a sword, it smote like a hammer at the whole body of sin, and it my bowels it burned like fire”.  Wynne had become a Quaker – and was one of the earliest and staunchest members of the Welsh Society of Friends. He wrote pamphlets including The Antiquity of the Quakers Proved out of the Scriptures of Truth…in 1677, and was imprisoned for his Quaker beliefs. It was the persecution of the Quakers in seventeenth-century Britain that led to their search for a new land that offered peaceful settlement and the opportunity to set up a community of like-minded individuals. When William Penn was given a grant of land by Charles II in 1681, Thomas Wynne was one of twelve individuals who formed a committee to meet Penn in London. Along with John ap John of Llangollen, Wynne took up a patent for 5000 acres of land in Pennsylvania, for which he paid £100, and reputedly built one of the first brick houses in Philadelphia.[2]

Portrait of William Penn

How did Wynne’s medical practices colour his life both in Wales and America? It is possible to piece together something of his medical life from a collection of sources – perhaps most important of which is his own testimony. This quote from Wynne is reproduced from John Cule’s Wales and Medicine (1973).

“My genious from a child did lead me to surgery, insomuch that before I was ten years old, I several times over-ran my school and home when I heard of anyone’s being wounded or hurt, and used all my endeavours to see Fractures and Dislocations reduced and wounds dressed…my parents thought they had lost me forever for which I received severe correction. My Father died before I was eleaven years old and my Mother [was] not able to produce so great a sum as to set me to chirurgery…until I became acquainted with an honest friend, and good artist in Chyrurgery whose name was Richard Moore of Salop, who seeing my forwardnesse to Chyrurgery, did further me in it”. By the completion of his training he was regarded as an expert “in the use of the Plaister Box and Salvatory, the Trafine and Head Saw, the Amputation Saw, and the Catling, the Cautery, Sirring and Catheter”.

Richard Moore, from whom Wynne learned his trade, was a surgeon and fellow Quaker. He was originally from Shrewsbury and clearly regarded him highly enough to apprentice his own son Mordecai to Wynne to learn the craft of surgery.

Wynne’s was a typical story of ‘on-the-job’ training, familiar to many families of rural areas. Unable to afford the large sums needed to fund a university education, Wynne was fortunate in finding a sympathetic teacher with whom he seems to have undergone an ad-hoc apprenticeship. Describing himself as “an expert in Drills and handy in Knife and Lancet” he constructed a model skeleton of a man. Despite the fact that his studies were interrupted for nearly six years by his imprisonment, his skill in physic was enough to be considered sufficient to obtain a medical licence, although there is no evidence to suggest that he did so. Licensing in Wales was increasing by the end of the seventeenth century, but many Welsh practitioners simply didn’t see the need since the attainment of a licence was not especially valued by ‘ordinary’ people, and the lack of others with licences didn’t engender the need to get one to compete.

Where exactly Wynne practised medicine is unclear. He is reported as a ‘practitioner in physic” in London for a time. Peter Elmer also suggests that he may be the same Thomas Wynne who served as a surgeon’s mate to one Walter Thompson among English forces in Scotland in 1651. It is also clear that his pamphleteering didn’t always win him friends. In answer to The Antiquity of the Quakers Proved, one William Jones accused Wynne of being “ignorant in his very trade of Quack-Chyrurgery”.

Once settled in Pennsylvania Wynne became an important figure. He bought and erected property in Philadelphia and took several office-holding positions including speaker of the first two Pennsylvania Assemblies and a Justice of the Peace, but ultimately living in America for only nine years. He is buried in the Friends’ burial ground at Duckett’s Farm, Philadelphia.

And so it was that the boy from the tiny parish of Ysceifiog rose to prominence in the nascent American colonies. As a Welsh medical practitioner of note Wynne is remarkable enough; but as an early Welsh progenitor of a global superpower he is a figure of great historical importance.

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[1] For more on Wynne’s religious beliefs and conversion see Geraint H. Jenkins, “From Ysceifiog to Pennsylvania: The rise of Thomas Wynne, Quaker barber-surgeon”, Flintshire Historical Society Journal, 28, (1977), pp. 39-40

[2] See John Cule, Wales and Medicine (Llandysul: Gomer Press 1973), p. 13

“The infamous Dr Foulkes”: The ‘black villain’ of 18th-century physick

National Library of Wales Ty Coch 22 Add. MS 836d (also known as ‘Piser Sioned’) is, like so many other early modern ‘miscellanies’ an absolute treasure trove of information. Attributed to various authors over a period of several decades, it contains everything from family records to poems, and quotes from Tyco Brahe.

In the first few pages are records of ‘unfortunate days of the year’, alongside remedies for sore tendons and records of books that the anonymous author had lent to Arthur Jones. One of my particular remedies in the book is this one:

“An approved imparabl’d medicine to eat anie overgrown film over an eye

R;/ The green part of a goose dung fresh (or at least very juicy) it will not be fitt after 16 or 24 hours, drop the juice thereof into the Eye with the dew that falls on the first, second or third day of june, wch you must provide or procure in that season. The first does the effect, the second clears the Eye, it does nt smart at all, and nothing has been found better as yet”

Needless to say that putting fresh, “green” goose dung into your eyes is probably best consigned to the book of history. Let’s just take it as read that people at the time believed it would do them good, and leave it at that!

Elsewhere in the document, however, is a record that is starkly at odds with the more generic and haphazard notes that make up the majority. It is unsigned, making it difficult to verify the allegations being made, but appears to relate to someone who has first-hand knowledge of the events being described. First taking the form of a vernacular poem, the verse is dated 1716 and headed:

“To the infamous Dr Foulks, Dr of Physick and Rector of Llanbedr in Denbighshire”.

It is worth quoting the first two verses to get a flavour of the allegations.

Thou Holy letcher thou religious cheat

How shall I halfe thy horrid guilt repeat

Now but my colours strong enough to paint

The blackest villain in a seeming saint

Doe lay thee open to a publick vicar

For greater crimes than ever Judas knew

Thou art, what shall I say, thou art alone

Whose sins epitome, all sins in one

…

And yet

Thou art too vile to live too bad to die

Nor canst thou from deserved vengeance fly…

 

by philtrers force and sympathetick charms

Oh! Black physician to the fernal Tribe

Who canst for soul and body to prescribe

But such designs thy medicine impart

That both are ruined by the cursed art

 

“Quick, Strait, begone from Wallia, Fruitful Isle

To some far distant unpregnated soile”

 

Strong stuff. “The blackest villain in a seeming saint”, “Black physician to the [in]fernal tribe”. Clearly he was a notorious figure in Llanbedr. But who was this “Dr Foulks…and what had he done?

The Reverend Robert Foulkes of Llanfrothen, Merionethshire, was indeed an M.D. who had graduated from Oxford in 1725. This Dr Foulkes was a correspondent of some of the most eminent physicians of his day and, in 1718, had set up his own physic garden at Cambridge. He wrote to Welsh luminaries such as Edward Lhuyd (then at the Bodleian) on the subject of botany, and was considered to be an authority in his field. Reportedly of delicate health he died young. All in all, this does not sound like the sort of man to inspire the vitriol of the ‘Piser Sioned’ author.

By incredible coincidence, however, there was another Robert Foulkes, also a vicar and physician, at roughly the same time, and it is this man who is the more likely candidate. The Reverend Robert Foulkes of Llanbedr Dyffryn Clwyd, Gwynedd, indeed seems to be the subject of the poem but he is a shadowy figure. Little can be found about either him or his medical practice so we have only the poem to shed light. What had he done to elicit such contempt? Luckily for us the poet left a few lines of narrative to fill in the blanks. At the very end of the poem, written in the margin, is the following note:

“The subject is now too well known but futurity may drown it in oblivion, unless it be commemorated in writeing as thus,

The s(ai)d doctor was guardian to the young ladies of Llanerch in Flintshire with(?) the Davises. He debauched one at 13 years of age and gave her physick to prevent conception. He lay with her 15 or 20 years, at last she refuted physick and conceived, she was delivered privately, he disowned the childe, but s(ai)d he had to do with her mother and did not know(?) but the child might be his grandchild – a black villain”

 

So Dr Foulkes’ sins were laid bare. It is unclear whether this poem was ever published but it would fit the sort of libel that could be distributed around a local area or pinned up in prominent places. Since the “subject [was] now too well known” it seems that Foulkes already had a soured reputation. That he was a vicar, entrusted with the moral and spiritual health of his parishioners, would have been difficult for them to accept. That the sins occurred with young women with whom he had been entrusted with their care would surely have been worse. Even when faced with the allegations and the presence of an illegitimate child Foulkes seemingly refused to take responsibility.

I’m still on the hunt for information about this ‘black villain’ and it would be interesting to find out more about him. Vicars who practised medicine were not uncommon, but those who inspired such venom as did Dr Foulkes certainly are. Sadly, it seems that figures of authority or fame who used their positions to exploit or abuse others are not just a modern phenomenon.

A Welsh doctor, Sir Hans Sloane, and the disappearing catheter!

**WARNING: CONTAINS SOME GRAPHIC DESCRIPTION OF A PARTICULARLY UNCOMFORTABLE SURGICAL TECHNIQUE**

In 1720, Dr Alban Thomas was something of a high-flyer. The son of a Pembrokeshire cleric and poet, Alban first matriculated from Oxford in 1708, became librarian of the Ashmolean museum, assistant secretary of the Royal Society and, if that wasn’t enough, obtained his doctorate in medicine from Aberdeen in 1719. At a time when Wales was still a largely rural country, with no medical institutions of its own and fairly poortransport and road infrastructures, these were exceptional achievements for a boy from Newcastle Emlyn.Also unusual was that Alban appears to have returned to Wales to set up his medical practice; many Welsh practitioners who had trained in Oxford or London chose not to return, choosing the potentially more lucrative market of the larger English towns. Nonetheless, especially in and around the growing Welsh towns, there was still a relatively wealthy Welsh elite to cater for and some, like Alban, positioned themselves to serve the denizens of large estates and houses.

It is clear, though, that Alban still had connections. One of his correspondents was no less a luminary than Sir Hans Sloane, the Irish physician to the fashionable and, indeed, the royal and, later, president of the Royal Society. Surviving letters from Alban Thomas to Sloane suggest that theirs was a fairly regular correspondence, with Sloane acting in an advisory role for particular cases. It is one particular case that interests us here.

Sir Hans Sloane

In November 1738, Alban Thomas wrote to Sloane regarding a patient, Sir Thomas Knolles of Wenallt, Pembrokeshire, who was causing him concern. Knolles, although “a person of great worth, candour and humanity” was also “a person of very gross habit, of body an unusual size and make and about 20 stone weight with an appetite to his meat but very moderate in his drinking”. Knolles enjoyed exercise but, due to his size, this was often done on horseback.

At some stage, Knolles had become ‘dropsicall’ and suffered from swollen legs. The doctor used a combination of diuretics and tight, laced stockings to countermand this with, he reported, some success as Knolles returned to health, requiring only the odd purge as a ‘spring clean’. About four years previously however Knolles had begun to complain of a swelling in his scrotum, which Alban Thomas assumed to be hydrocele – a condition causing grossly swollen testicles (sometimes treated by injecting port wine into the testicles). After drawing off “about a quart of limpid serum” from the stoic Knolles testicles, followed by a dressing and strict recovery routines, the doctor hoped that he had cured the condition for good. This proved to be premature.

A selection of bladder stones and calculus

When Knolles began to complain sometimes of not being able to pass urine at all, at others a few drops and occasionally losing his bladder control entirely, he took it upon himself to get a second opinion from an unnamed doctor in nearby Haverfordwest. This physician prescribed a ‘Turbith vomit’ which wrought well and even caused Knolles to void a stone about the size of a kidney bean. Rather than being put off by this occurrence, Knolles was encouraged and began to pester Dr Thomas to give him more of these treatments. Unimpressed and undeterred,Thomas decided on a more proactive course. After putting Knolles on a course of diuretic medicines, liquors and balsams for a week he brought in to his consulting room. What happened next highlights the particular horrors of early modern surgery.

When Knolles arrived, Dr Thomas first applied a Turbith vomit, hoping that “so rugged a medicine” would clear the blockage without the need for more invasive procedures. It didn’t. In fact, the symptoms grew worse. It was at this point that Dr Thomas reached for his catheter and introduced it into the unfortunate Sir Thomas’s member. Expecting some resistance, he was surprised to find that the catheter went in without resistance. “On the contrary it seemed to force itself out of my fingers after passing the neck of the bladder as if it was sucked in, which I thought was owing to the pressure of his belly, the crooked end was now upward”. Yes, you read it right. The catheter was ‘sucked’ out of the doctors fingers and upwards further into the bladder! Now, any male readers may want to cross their legs!

In an attempt to probe for the stone that he feared was lurking in the bladder, and to release some water, Dr Thomas decided to turn the catheter around. At this point, the poor patient “cryed out with some violence…TAKE IT OUT I CAN BEAR IT NO LONGER”. Happily for Knolles the catheter came out “with as much ease as it went in without one drop through it or immediately after it”.

Three months later, the patient was still suffering, with the addition of great pain, defying all attempts for his relief. Despite being a “hail, hearty man having good lungs but lyable to hoarseness” and the occasional cold, Alban Thomas perceived him to be a healthy man. His efforts to treat Knolles had so far failed and he appealed to the eminent Sloane to help him “form a right judgement in this case”.

And so we leave the story there. What happened to Knolles is unclear, but the pain of his condition can only have been matched by the pain of his treatment. Suffering a succession of violent vomits, pills, electuaries and, finally, a wandering catheter, it is almost amazing to think that he ever went near Dr Alban Thomas again. Such (uncomfortable) cases remind us of the situation facing patients in the early modern period. For some the decision to see a doctor must have been a balancing act between bearing their illness or facing treatment.

Appreciating the doctor in early modern Britain!

What was the position of the practitioner within the seventeenth-century community?  How did people regard both them and the services they provided? It has often been said that doctors were unpopular. It was, after all, the local doctor’s prescriptions that commonly made you either violently sick, gave you diarrhoea or otherwise left you similarly disadvantaged or distressed. ‘Damn the Doctor’ ran the title of one seventeenth-century satire. Advice given to Lord Herbert about his health in 1681 suggested that he “never see a damn’d doctor again as long as ye shall live”. According to the poet Bernard Mandeville, “Physicians value fame and wealth/above the drooping patient’s health”. Were doctors really disliked that much?

(Courtesy of Wellcome Images)

In fact, there is much evidence to show that people appreciated the services of their local practitioners. This was, remember, a world of sickness. Danger lurked in bad airs, unwholesome environments, noisome streets, unwashed bodies and verminous bedding. It has even been argued that most people felt ill in some way for most of the time.  The local doctor was by no means the answer to all of this; but, (s)he was one weapon in the continuing war waged upon sickness and disease.

It is difficult to access ‘ordinary’ people’s views about practitioners. One way we can do this is through their testimonies in prosecutions, giving a rare chance to hear the actual voices of patients. But, obviously, these only tell us of cases that had gone wrong. Finding testimonies to practitioners who had obviously done well is more challenging. One possible way to do this, though, is through the surviving records of community testimonials to the skills of their local practitioner.

For some doctors, to achieve some level of legitimacy (perhaps more for themselves than their patients) meant obtaining a licence to practice from either the Royal Colleges, the Archbishop of Canterbury or one of the various diocesan bishops. In theory, and indeed in law, all physicians should have obtained a licence, but this was neither practical nor easy to enforce beyond London and its surroundings. Nevertheless, one aspect of applying for a licence was providing some sort of proof of good, charitable or successful practice in a particular neighbourhood.

(Picture courtesy of Wellcome Images)

When David Davies of Llangurig applied for a licence to practice from the Bishop of Bangor in 1749, no less than three local vicars testified that the “said David Davies is a very usefull person in his neighbourhood, has performed several cures in surgery, and (as far as we are judges) we think him a person worthy to be licens’d”.  (National Library of Wales MS Bangor Episcopal B-SM-2).  The supporters of Richard Davies of Llanynys stressed that he was a “person of good character” and “hath performed several cures in surgery”. (NLW MS Bangor Episcopal B-SM-3). When Benjamin Powell of Brecon applied for a licence in 1708, a list of local parishioners supported his application, stating that he was “a p(er)son who is commendably instructed both in the art of Phisick and Chirurgery and is very much Experienced in both the sayd arts, as being one who hath undergone and p(er)formed severall great and desperate cures”. (NLW, Church in Wales Diocese of Llandaff episcopal 1, MS 1194).

It is worth mentioning too that it was not only men, nor ‘orthodox’ practitioners who could rely upon the support of their communities. In fact, where an unlicensed practitioner faced prosecution, the people of Ledbury in Herefordshire intervened and petitioned the Bishop of Hereford to try and save her from prosecution:

“Sir,

The bearer is an honest poor woman of ye parish of Ledbury, who is as far as we are informed, cited into your court for practising surgery. She sometime ago cured a pauper of our parish who had at that time seven small children of a sore breast, without any prospect of reward; and ye parish, hearing of ye service she had done them, ordered ye overseers of ye poor to give her five shill: wch is ye only act of this nature of we can hear she ever did. This matter being so very malitious, we request the favour she may be discharged. She is very poor therefore we hope it may be with as little expence as possible…” (NLW Bodewryd (2), MS 380)

In terms of financial gain, not all doctors were out to fleece their patients. It was not uncommon for practitioners to tailor their bills towards the financial means of their patients. A poor patient might even be treated free, or for a few pennies; a wealthy yeoman might have to spend a few shillings. Also, the local parish authorities could intervene to either bring a practitioner to attend to a sick parishioner or, alternatively, send a parishioner to a large town to secure the services of a well-known or well-respected doctor.

It is worth mentioning too that early-modern people had perhaps a different level of expectation with regard to what the doctor could do. Today, we go to the doctor and expect to be diagnosed – instantly – and sent on our way with a prescription for a ‘cure’. This worked slightly differently in the seventeenth century. When people went to the doctor, they engaged in a two-way dialogue to agree diagnosis and secure a receipt or preparation. Once this was obtained it is questionable whether the early-modern patient expected to be cured. Rather, they hoped to be cured but, if this didn’t work, there were plenty of other doctors and receipts to try – often gleaned from friends and neighbours. If they did recover, naturally they might attribute that recovery to the doctor and his preparation. This would then be retained for future use as a ‘probatum’ (proven) remedy. In this sense, the doctor might easily escape sanction if his cures failed, as the patient was only using his services as one of a range of options in any case.

Before we write off early-modern practitioners as figures of distrust, dislike or ridicule, it’s worth remembering that they were often valued members of a community whose efforts to help their fellow parishioners were appreciated. Often treating the poor for free, and providing an important source of medical knowledge and goods, they offered some degree of comfort in a world where sickness was ubiquitous.

Lady Elinor Stepney and the Georgian ‘Heroine Pill’

In many ways, Lady Elinor Stepney of Llanelly, Glamorganshire, (born 1702) had everything going for her. She was the only daughter, and therefore sole heiress, to the fortune and lands of her father John Lloyd of Llangennech, including the picturesque house of Buwchllaethwen near Llanelly. She married John Stepney, heir of the wealthy patriarch Sir Thomas Stepney of Llanelly, and together they had five children; Margaretta (b. 1718), Justina (b. 1719), Maria (b. 1721), Thomas (b. 1724) and John (b. 1726).

Buwchllaethwen House – ancestral home of Elinor Stepney

By the late 1720s, perhaps unsurprisingly, given that she bore so many children in such a relatively short space time, Elinor was somewhat delicate and prone to bouts of illness. But these were no attacks of fashionable nervousness or fainting; she was chronically ill. Information about her ailments is sketchy, but a series of letters from Elinor, her husband John, and some prominent medical practitioners, can help us to recreate what was an increasingly desperate situation.

It is difficult to say, from nearly 300 years’ distance what was wrong with Elinor, although a common theme seems to have been chronic stomach pains and fits. In January 1729, for example, she was suffering from “Colical pains”, and had regular fits which left her debilitated and weak. According to her husband, after having “escap’d her fits from Tuesday to Sunday” but then was stricken with terrible pains that “seized her in her stomack, side, back, gut…with a palpitation of the heart & thence it dispers’d itself in to her stomack as before, then to the back and both the sides, the violence of which would throw her into small fits, & her stomach very much swelled”. Even down the centuries, this account of the “violence” of her pain is striking.

It is clear from other clues that Elinor’s sickness had an impact on the family’s life. It was said that the Stepneys rarely left Llannelly House, preferring the peace and solitude of a country life. But, clearly worried about his wife’s deteriorating condition, John Stepney was determined to seek out the best medical advice that money could buy, and this often took he and his wife outside their native countryside and to one of the most busy and cosmopolitan cities in Georgian Britain.

One of his Stepney’s correspondents was Dr John Powell of Carmarthen, in many ways an unusual Welsh practitioner. Powell was distinguished from his many unlicensed and unorthodox colleagues by having gone to Lincoln College in Oxford, achieving a BA, MA and MD. He was licensed by the Bishop of Llandaff to practise medicine in the diocese of Llandaff, Hereford and St Davids and letters testimonial to his skills were signed by several medical luminaries, including the president of the Royal College of Physicians in London, Thomas Witherley.  Unusually, given that many Welsh doctors who left the Principality to train subsequently set up practice outside Wales, Powell returned to Carmarthen and counted a number of wealthy Welsh gentry amongst his clients.

But Powell also seems to have taken advantage of the popularity of the newly fashionable city of Bath, and especially its growing reputation as a place of healing, as it appears that he sometimes held a practice there.  Even more interestingly, his consultations were not always held alone; letters suggest that he occasionally held court with another rising medical star – Richard Mead. Mead was a celebrated Whig physician and medical author who had attended Padua and Leiden, and studied under the famous Herman Boerhaave. He was a fellow of the Royal Society, fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and was physician to George II. Amongst the exclusive clients who made their way to Bath to consult these two luminaries were Sir John, and Lady Stepney.

Richard Mead (1673-1754)

Powell first corresponded with John Stepney, their letters discussing Elinor’s health, and mentioning the consultations in Bath, the prescriptions given and offering further advice. At this point it seems that Elinor was the third party. John Stepney seemingly took responsibility for ordering the many medicaments that Powell prescribed, generally including purges, vomits and various electuaries, pastes and juleps. In January 1729, for example, Powell recommended “a paper of cordial powders” to help with her stomach pains, as well as a “stomack plaster to spread and apply to her stomack”. If she found herself “bound”, she could take “2 ownces of purging tincture” to relieve her symptoms. From Dr Mead came the advice to take chalybeate tincture, and drink “bitter decoction” and peppermint waters. These were well-known digestifs and were clearly targeted specifically at her symptoms.

A common theme in the letters is that of the sheer amounts of medicines that Lady Stepney must have been taking. So much so, in fact, that she frequently ran out and even, on occasions, depleted local supplies so much that emergency doses had to be obtained from Powell in Carmarthen, but even from London. In September 1725, there was even a note of irritation in Powell’s letter to John Stepney regarding the increasing demand. “Had your lady spoken to me that she would have her things made by our apothecary here” he wrote “I would have sent them to her by the first carrier when I came home”.  As a result, he chastised Stepney, “she has lost a pretty deal of time both in takeing the medicines & drinking ye waters”. Powell immediately sent for another batch of medicaments, including a “fresh cargo from London”, including “a Vomit, 2 Doses of Purging Pils, a Paper of Ingredients for a bitter wine, anchovies, Garlic Electurary” and a “Antiscorbutic Electuary”.

By 1730, Powell was corresponding directly with Elinor herself, and it seems that her treatment had now included visiting Bath again to take the waters, although the sulphourous liquids did little to ease her discomfort. In June 1730 Powell noted that her stomach “acted indifferent” to most types of food and that she should stick to drinking asses or goats milk until such time that she could bear to take the waters again.

It also seems that Powell was becoming increasingly concerned about Lady Stepney’s apparent habit of staying indoors.  It was imperative, he argued, that she “use exercise to get out into the air more or less everie other day, if not everie day”, and for three to four miles every morning, whether walking or on horseback, or even in a coach “if it be inclement weather”.  This, he argued, would “restore your lost Stomack and Appetite and cause all ye animal functions to perform their proper office”. Such themes of natural, animal constitutions, vigorous exercise and fresh air, were common in eighteenth-century medical thought.

But one of Powell’s prescriptions to Elinor stands out particularly from the page. On returning from a consultation in Bath in May 1731, Powell made reference to some prescriptions from Richard Mead, and to one pill in particular. These pills were made from “Russia Castor, Goa stone & wild valerian, with the syrup of compound peony”.  These pills were designed to ‘loosen’ the constitution, and be taken in conjunction with a cordial julep. The pills, Powell stated, “I call ye heroine pills”. Not to be confused with the Class A drug, it is interesting that the use of the name predates the latter use by 250 years. Perhaps Lady Stepney was one of the first in history to partake of a dose of ‘Heroine’.

Unfortunately there is no happy end to this tale. Elinor died in 1734, at the young age of 32. Her memorial reads:

“Near this place rested the body of Mrs Eleanor Stepney wife of John Stepney Esquire, and daughter of John Lloyd of Llangennech, Esquire. She was a most obliging, endearing wife, a most tender but prudent Mother; happy in all valuable endowments, religious and moral; constant in her devotions to God, ever sincere to her friends, charitable to the poor, just and benevolent to all, a pattern truly worthy the imitation of her sex. In her husband’s affectionate esteem she still lives and as an instance of that esteem this monument is erected to her memory. She died the 3rd of January 1733/4. Aged 32 years”

Despite the best efforts of her husband, family and some of the most prominent medical practitioners and treatments of her day, Lady Elinor was ultimately helpless in her ongoing battle against her unknown malady. The striking accounts of her treatments and suffering provide us with a useful, if ultimately tragic, account of the experience of sickness in eighteenth-century Britain.

Concocting Recipes: The early modern medical home.

It has long been argued that the early modern home was a medical hub. And, in many ways, so it was. Sickness was first and last a domestic experience. It was almost always treated in the home and, given the range of potential conditions, the presence of one or more sick members of the family was doubtless a fairly regular occurrence.

In the main, it was women who were expected to take responsibility for medicating the household.  Women were assumed to be natural carers, and also to have acquired some skill in the preparation of medical recipes, and their application, by the time they reached the age of consent to marry. There were books dedicated to schooling literate women in the art of physick, many including what was effectively a ‘starter’s collection’ of remedies to enable them to treat a large number of common conditions. Indeed, medicine was part of the wider role of ‘housewife’, and ‘huswifery’ meant looking after the inhabitants, as well as maintaining the living space.

The role of men in household medicine is far less defined. There were, for example, no books specifically written to help men cope in the case of domestic illness. And yet they clearly did cope. Diaries, such as those by Phillip Henry of Broad Oak in Flintshire, and Robert Bulkeley of Dronwy, Anglesey, both note sickness episodes of their wives, and suggest that they played a part in caring for them. It is also clear that men played a part in the acquisition of ingredients, often keeping records of where they found herbs for sale cheaply, or which apothecary they regularly purchased from. In this sense, medicine still fitted in to the patriarchal male family role, since it involved a broader input into the physical care and support of the family.

One question that remains largely unresolved, however, is that of how well equipped the early modern home was to cope with sickness. The contents of domestic recipe books suggest not only that a very broad range of skills were needed to be able to concoct remedies, but also that a range of equipment would also be necessary. How well equipped were ‘ordinary’ homes to meet these needs?

One body of sources that lets us peer back inside the early modern home are probate records. When a person died, the probate process often required a list of their household contents to be made to allow their estate to be valued. For the study of the material culture of this period, these sources are incredibly valuable. They are, however, often frustratingly vague, and all depends on the diligence of the individual surveyor. For example, a detailed record might list every individual possession, room by room, including furniture, ornaments, valuables, but also sometimes even book titles and foodstuffs held in storage. Much depended on the intrinsic value of the goods; if they had a resale value, they might be worth including. In less detailed inventories, however, a whole room might be listed under a single entry, with a generic term like ‘household stuff’.

In terms of medical items, this causes a problem. Things like herbs and, perhaps, individual jars of ointments or medicines were too impermanent to list, so don’t appear in the inventories of ‘ordinary’ households and very seldom even in elite household inventories. Equally, finding any equipment that can be definitely be classified as ‘medical’ is problematic, since many had dual usage. Nevertheless, it is still worth speculating based on available evidence, to see if any hints about the material culture of domestic medicine can be gleaned from these sources.

Whilst writing my PhD thesis, to try and address this question, I looked at over 1300 inventories from 82 parishes in the county of Glamorgan in South Wales. I decided to look for two items of equipment in particular – the pestle and mortar, and the brewing still. Many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century self-help books extolled the virtues of a well equipped kitchen. For the seventeenth-century medical writer Thomas Brugis, top of the list of items desirous for those people wishing ‘to compound medicine themselves’ were ‘a great mortar of marble and another of brasse’. A long list of other items were included, from ‘copper pannes to make decoctions’, ‘glasses for cordiall powders’ and a range of medical implements. The popular medical author Gervase Markham, also entreated his idealised English housewife to ‘furnish herself of very good stills, for the distillation of all kinds of waters…for the health of her household’, and the emphasis all round lay firmly with a well-equipped kitchen, able to minister autonomously to sick family members within a household.#

As a baseline test, over 91% of the inventories contained at least one item of kitchen equipment, including pots, pans, crocks and so on. Overall, the suggestion was that the vast majority of homes had at least the ability to concoct basic remedies. As Elaine Leong has recently noted, for example, boiling was needed in around 20-30% of early modern remedies.

But what of more specialised equipment? The results were interesting. Out of 1248 inventories, only 148 (11%) had listed a pestle and mortar. Before 1635, there were no occurrences whatsoever, and a peak of ownership didn’t seem to occur until the early eighteenth century. Whilst this figure of 11% should definitely be taken as a bare minimum to allow for inevitable under-recording, this still seems surprisingly low. What was also clear, though, was that the item was more common in better-off households, and also in urban areas. The pestle and mortar would have been a basic utensil for grinding herbs and spices into powder. Whilst not owning one certainly can’t be used as evidence to say that a home wasn’t ‘medical’, its lack of appearance is still noteworthy.

Turning to the ‘still’ or ‘limbeck’ the results were even more striking. A still was a multi-purpose item, which could be used for home brewing, as well as the distillation and fermentation of substances for medical recipes. It has recently been calculated that around 10% of remedies required a still in this period. Despite this, the Glamorgan inventories yielded a total of only 41 references in 1248 inventories, giving an average of less than 3%. Here again, ownership was general limited to wealthier households.

[A full statistical analysis, including comparisons with other Welsh counties was included but, for the sake of brevity, it’s not detailed here. See Alun Withey, Health, Medicine and the Family in Wales, 1600-1750 (Swansea University, Phd Thesis, 2009)]

It is also worth noting (albeit perhaps unsurprisingly as noted earlier) that no inventories contained any reference to medical remedies, ingredients or substances, and only a bare few contained items which could be construed as ‘medical’, such as a blood dish in one home, and a ‘nurseing chayre’ in another.

What do these results tell us? They certainly don’t tell us that early modern homes did not manufacture their own medicines, nor that they were incapable of doing so. Even the most basic of utensils could be used in this process, and the majority of homes possessed these.

They also don’t reveal much physical evidence of medicine, such as a ‘storehouse’ of remedies or ingredients, but this is, in many ways, entirely logical. Medicine was transitory and pragmatic. Recipes were often concocted as and when needed. Some, like ointments, could last for years and be kept, but many were too impermanent to keep. Also, just because they weren’t listed, doesn’t mean they weren’t there. Whilst some historians are beginning to question the extent to which each household physically grew its own herbs, it’s plausible that many did.

But what is also interesting is the availability of ingredients for remedies in even the smallest rural shops. People could purchase exotic herbs and spices from their village shop, as well as compound remedies such as plague water and Venice Treacle. It is entirely possible that the extent to which domestic production was intertwined with the medical marketplace has yet to be appreciated.

In any case, there is a need for more studies into the material culture of early modern domestic medicine. If the early modern home was indeed a medical hub, a wider study should give us a broader understanding not only of what medicines people used in their homes, but how they made them.

Social Networks and the spread of medical remedies in early modern Britain:

Much recent work by historians has highlighted the extent that medical knowledge was part of a ‘knowledge economy’ in the early modern period. Put simply, health and medicine were regular topics of conversation, whether in person or by letter. Just like today people told each other of their symptoms, suggested favourite remedies or recommended particular doctors. In some ways too, early modern people were perhaps more sensitive to their own bodies than we are today; they understood their bodies through a framework of the four humours, and had some idea of their own particular humoral balance. Also, they monitored their health constantly, ever vigilant for potentially unusual or dangerous changes.

With less easy access to medical practitioners for many of the population, self-medication was the first recourse in times of sickness. It made sense to have an armoury of remedies at the ready, just in case. In literate households, manuscript collections of remedies were effectively the next best thing to a consultation with a physician. But how were these collections assembled? Where did the remedies come from? By looking at a typical eighteenth-century recipe book in more detail, we can start to see the ways that medical information travelled through social networks in early modern Britain.

Between roughly 1706 and 1717, Amy Rowlands of the wealthy Rowlands family of Plas Gwyn, Anglesey, compiled her own book of medical and culinary receipts (available to see at the University of Bangor library, as MS Henblas A5). Her book is typical of the form. It is carefully laid out, written in a fair hand and fully indexed, following the format of a ‘receptaria’ medical book.  The image below is from the first page of the book, where Amy seems to be trying out a few writing exercises, based on a moral pnemonic.

Amy’s book contains more than a hundred recipes for a variety of conditions and using a wide range of ingredients. This one, “for the stone”, is fairly typical.

“Dry the roots of Red nettles and make them into pouder and drink a spooonfull of the powder thereof in a draught of white wine something warme and it will break the stone though itt bee ever soe great. And that with speed use it every day until the stone and gravell be all broken and consumed, A thinge of smale prices and great virtue”.

Looking through the book, it is clear that the sources of Amy’s recipes were broad, and included local acquaintances as well as a variety of more intriguing sources. Some, for example, were clearly given directly to her by people from her network of family and friends. Examples of these include:

‘To make Ginger Bread with honey Madam Griffiths way’‘To make Ginger Bread the best way Cosen Sidney Rowland is way’.

“Madam Griffiths is more difficult to trace, but ‘Cosen Sidney Rowland’ lived in Dewis Bren near Llangollen, and therefore in reasonably close proximity to Amy.  “A Reciept for a Consumptick Cough” was provided by  “Mrs Jane Williams of Ty yn ystrithsons”, clearly another acquaintance, as was a recipe for “flower water” attributed to Mrs Griffiths of Carnarvon – again, in very close proximity to Amy’s Anglesey home.

Aside from family and friends, there were other potential sources of remedies. One recipe, for example, was kept from a consultation with a practitioner:

“A Diett drink Dr Humphreys Recett to me Amy Rowlands

Take of the bark of Ash of the tender twigs of tamarisk of each two ounces of the same of Brooklime: scurvy grass, Liverwort, Hartshorn, Agrimony: Sage of each one handful: of Sene three ounces. Bruse all these and infuse them in seven quarts of smale(?) ale: after 24 hours you may drink of itt about half a pint furst in the morning and last att night you may ad quince seeds Brused to correct the wind if you please”.

For me, these records are especially interesting. Firstly, and obviously, they confirm that Amy sought the help of a doctor – one ‘Dr Humphreys’. Receipts attributed to doctors often appear in remedy collections, without the author having necessarily ever consulted the physician in question. Hence can be found remedies such as “Dr Butler’s receipt for the plague water”, noted in several collections from Wales at this time.  The inclusion of the title leant provenance and value to the remedy, especially if it had a positive reputation. Amy’s note here, however, strongly suggests that she had met (or perhaps consulted by post) this “Dr Humphreys”, and she recorded his directions for future use. Locating Humphreys is difficult given the commonness of his surname, but he was likely a local practitioner or apothecary, and unlikely to have been licensed.

Indeed, Amy Rowlands was seemingly not overly concerned about the ‘professional’ credentials of a practitioner; it was the reputation of a remedy that mattered more. A remedy for a ‘Meigrim in the head’ is included, attributed to “Pembrockshir Bess” – perhaps a cunning woman or magical healer.

Sources could, though, also come from much further afield, and suggested spread by word of mouth, rather than personal acquaintance.  The remedy below is attributed to “Mrs Pitt who lived in Stippleton in Dorsettshire” and is a receipt to make “a very good seercloth”. Amy included a note that she had made this recipe herself, and found it good – perhaps the best indicator of its reliability.

The efficacy of a remedy, though, was not just based on whether it had cured the author of the collection; the opinions and testimonials of others were just as valuable.

‘An infallible cure for sore Eies effected on Captain Fitspatrick in London when Given Over by all doctors, Given me by Mr Moris Owens of Holy Head

Taking some Garlick and pound them and bay salt together into a sort of a pultiss and apling them to the soles of the feet spread on leather for nine nights sucksesifly the which has done a wonderful cure upon the above Gentilman

In this example, the benefactor of the remedy was “Mr Moris Owens’ who perhaps (although by no means certainly) knew the ‘Captain Fitspatrick’ upon whom the initial remedy was so successful. Here, the remedy had travelled a physical distance (from London to North Wales), but had also moved through a social network by several removes, connecting people who otherwise had nothing to link them.

It is this last point that really highlights the value of these fantastic sources. They certainly reveal much about medicines, ingredients and the physical processes of manufacturing remedies in the early modern period. But, in cases where authorship and attributions are known, they also reveal much about the diversity of sources of medical information and the sheer wealth of medical knowledge that was available. Far from being helpless in the face of sickness, people in fact were surrounded by potential sources of relief. Recipe collections offer us a unique insight into this process.

(Images are copyrighted to me, and used with permission of the archive at Bangor University: Please do not reproduce them without the express permission of Bangor archives. Thanks)

The mystery of ‘Sansom Jones’ – the phantom Welsh doctor

“This book I had from — a resident of this parish (Bettws in Monmouthshire), who swears it was the book of Sansom Jones a physician of this county, some two hundred years ago”.

This note, dated around the early twentieth century, appears in the front cover of an intriguing manuscript – Cardiff public library MS 2.126. Since I first came across the document in 2005, it has fascinated me as it represents something of a mystery. It is, or at least appears to be, a remedy collection dating to around the early seventeenth century. It looks and feels ‘right’. The palaeography is consistent with a document of that age. The layout is what you’d expect from an early modern receipt book and the remedies are neatly written and ordered. And yet it is one of the most frustrating sources I have ever looked at.

It should be a fascinating view into the medical world of that most rare of creatures – the early modern Welsh doctor. We even have his name – relatively unusual for sources of this type. Except, so far, “Sansom Jones” has eluded every attempt I have made to find out more about him…or even to establish whether he even existed. He highlights one of the big problems for historians in trying to piece together individual lives through scattered documents. We have a few pieces of the jigsaw, but not the final picture. It also raises the danger in assuming that documents in local or county archives are necessarily from their own area.

Let’s start at the beginning of the ‘Jones’ document. The first couple of pages are interesting. The book begins with a list of standard apothecary measures – a common enough inclusion, especially if this were the book of a practitioner. Lists of scruples, drachms and other measures were necessary and useful in compounding the correct measures and dosages of remedies. But then the plot thickens, and the name ‘Bethia Marsh’ is written in bold script, suggesting authorship or ownership; more about that later. But also prominently written is the following heading:

“Noblest teaching of urine to know the proffices thereof for the nature of man and woman which is known through urines. Through which urines the sicknesses of men are knowne, translated out of lattine (sic) into English. By mee Alexander Spraggot. 1569. May ixiiii”.

So the plot thickens. Here we appear to have the title page of a published book by the eponymous Mr Spraggot. We have an exact date and so, at least, a starting point. Looking at the book as a whole, it does ‘feel’ very much like a published work. It is very neatly set out and has, quite unusually, a complete alphabetical index at its end.

There is a section on uroscopy (the diagnosis of medical conditions by the appearance, smell and taste of human urine), followed by some general notes on life and health. These include “To knowe life or death/tokens of death”, “A treatise of Hypocras”, with astrological notes on sickness and other general observations including notes on why students are unhealthy – essentially because they spent so much time in motionless reading! The rest of the volume is given over to medical remedies, generally set out in order of different parts of the body.

For headaches, for example, there are remedies for “headach proceeding of a cold cause”, “headache proceeding of heate”, “for the mygrim or rigrim” and so on. Several pages deal with purges for various conditions, including “melancholie”, “palsey” and also specific diets, e.g. for the “rhewme”. There are sections on obstetrics and childbirth as well as conditions relating to both men and women. Given the standard practice of using animal, plant, and any number of other materials (!) in remedies of this time, there is ample evidence of a full range, and nothing out of the ordinary.

In many ways, there is much to support a theory of this as being the book of a practitioner; it contains just the sort of useful information that a practitioner might rely upon in his daily work. There is little evidence to suggest attributions in the book. In ‘domestic’ remedy collections (i.e. those used in families) it is common to find recipes gifted from others – e.g. my aunt’s remedy for a cold, Mrs x’s receipt for the gout, and so on. But this book has none, suggesting a more formal purpose. The fact that it is written in fair hand also supports a deliberate and disciplined document.

But if we look deeper at the document, what else might it reveal? Firstly, who was Alexander Spraggot? Did he indeed write a book called ‘noblest teachings of urine’, or might this be an unpublished manuscript from 1569? The answer to the latter is no. In terms of the date, I was partly lucky, since the paper was watermarked…but even this is slightly mysterious. Having sent a copy of the watermark to a colleague who specialises in this area, the watermark turned out to be from an unusual source for an early modern Welsh document…it was from Russia. Not only this, it dated no earlier than the mid seventeenth century, meaning that, at the very least, any copy from Spraggot’s original must have been done nearly a century later.

Searching under the name Alexander Spraggot reveals few likely candidates. Perhaps the most likely seems to be ‘Alexandrus Spraggot’, appointed the vicar of Martocke church in Somerset in 1564 – not a great distance from South Wales. But did Spraggot ever author a work of this name? Not as far as I can tell. There are no records in the British Library of a book by this title or author, so here the trail runs cold.

So what of the second name mentioned in the book – Bethia Marsh? Here again, I’ve drawn something of a blank. A lady of this name was born near Salem, Massachusetts in 1650 – roughly around the date of the creation of the book (or at least its paper), making her an unlikely candidate. The name isn’t especially Welsh either. One possibility is that Bethia was, at some point, the owner of this book which, after all, contained a large number of useful remedies. It was common for people to write their names in such books to assert ownership, and also for remedy collections to move across families as they were gifted, especially to newlyweds.

What, finally, of Sansom Jones, the mysterious Welsh practitioner of Bettws, south Wales? Is there anything to suggest that he was the true owner of the book? Sadly not. Having looked for the relatively unusual name of Sansom in likely parish records, I can find no trace…so far. He was not, at least as far as the records suggest, a licensed physician. His name doesn’t appear on any list of known doctors, nor does he appear to have been apprenticed or trained. None of this, of course, means that he never existed. He could, as many Welsh practitioners did, have simply carried on his medical practice to the local population unhindered by the need to obtain a licence, being so far from the centre in London. With such an indistinct date, he might have been of a later time period, with a misjudged attribution by the note writer. Another possibility is that he was actually from a different ‘Bettws’ than the one in Glamorganshire; there are several across Wales.

And so the search continues. As I turn my attentions back to Welsh medical practice (after a hiatus studying shaving and rupture trusses in the eighteenth century) the need to find out more about the daily life and work of Welsh doctors will again become paramount. If Sansom Jones was there, and if this was indeed his book, I want to find him, as ownership of these types of documents does much to provide an alternative to depictions of Welsh doctors as obsessed with folklore and magic.

p.s. If anyone can shed any light on any of this, I’d be very grateful.

Medical practice in early modern Wales – revision time!

I started researching Welsh medical history properly in 2004. At that point, there wasn’t really a big historiography on the early modern period for Wales…in fact there was essentially only one book. Over the years, I’ve been busy putting that to rights, and have so far published my own book, three academic articles, four book chapters and a range of other stuff. The obvious problem is that if anyone else chooses to start looking at this topic, my research is first in the firing line. But, that’s another day’s worry.

When I started working on the book, I decided to leave the issue of medical practice to one side. Physick and the Family is broadly about the experience of sickness in the early modern period. It looks at things like how people viewed sickness and how they conceptualised and described it. It looks at how well prepared people were to cope with a patient in their own homes, and also the ways in which friends, neighbours and the wider community coped with having a sick person in their midst. Except for when they became part of this sickness experience, doctors were not part of the remit. But they are now.

There has been a long-held view that Welsh doctors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were part of a practice that was stagnating, backward-looking and pretty much tied to its ancient past. There are certainly reasons to support this view. Unlike England, Ireland and Scotland, Wales had no institutions in which practitioners could focus or gather. It had no universities or colleges of medicine and, as such, there was no formal medical training available. There were no hospitals aside, perhaps, from the odd lying-in room or lazar house.

Until the late seventeenth century, Welsh doctors were relatively reluctant to purse a licence, which they were at least nominally supposed to have, although the lack of policing and distance from London meant that this wasn’t so important in the Principality. Those wishing for a career as a professional physician, though, generally left Wales to train in Oxford or London, and then generally didn’t bother to return. The net result of this has been a view of Welsh practice as a vacuum of orthodox medicine, which was filled by cunning folk (in Welsh the ‘dyn hysbys’ – cunning man), and various other ‘irregular’ practitioners.

The problem with this view is that it simply isn’t accurate. It suggests firstly that there was a lack of practitioners in Wales, which isn’t the case. Secondly, the terminology itself carries baggage. When we talk in terms of ‘irregular’ and ‘unorthodox’ it automatically suggests unskilled. This too is inaccurate since much of the evidence I have looked at over the years suggests that Welsh doctors often went to extraordinary lengths to keep up with wider developments in medicine.

Books, for example, were one way that doctors could keep themselves informed, and there is evidence that Welsh practitioners sometimes purchased even esoteric Latin texts in order to access the latest thinking. The first Welsh-language medical book wasn’t even published until 1736, so they were in effect forced to engage with medical literature in English or Latin.

Secondly, it is interesting to note that Welsh practitioners, alongside their English counterparts, often adopted the title ‘Doctor’ even though they had no degree or licence. In Wales this is interesting because it is an English term; there were Welsh equivalents like “Meddyg” and “Physigwr”, but “Dr” was the preferred term. Although we can’t read too much into this, it might suggest that such practitioners wanted to feel part of a wider medical fraternity or profession.

Thirdly, all evidence points to the practice of medicine being identical in form and function to that in England and across Europe. As has long been demonstrated elsewhere, orthodox practitioners did little different in material terms to the cunning man. Whilst ‘magical’ practitioners might dress up their remedies with symbolism and esoteric language, the basic form and function was the same.

This is not to say that folklore itself was unimportant – far from it. There was an extremely lively oral tradition of medical knowledge in the Welsh language, and strong beliefs in the power of cunning folk. Wales, it must be remembered, was a largely rural country, and one of marked geographical contrasts. There were areas of agricultural lowlands, but also upland, mountainous regions, where travel was difficult. In many ways it was the perfect breeding ground for legends and magic to prosper.

But Wales shouldn’t be viewed as being cut off. It was connected in so many ways to the broader world. Shops, even in tiny villages, for example, sold a range of medical goods, imported often through large English towns such as Bristol, Chester and London, but sometimes directly through the coastal trade. People crossed the borders to visit English towns, again especially Bristol and along the marches, and Welsh accents would have been familiar in these towns. Welsh apothecaries had accounts with London suppliers, and imported proprietary medicines, meaning that Welsh people would have been familiar with popular potions like Daffy’s Elixir. They also bought newspapers and almanacks, so would have known about the lively medical marketplace developing in the seventeenth century.

Overall, Welsh medical practice is due an upgrade – if not a complete revision, and I’m ready to take on the task. I’m going to start on a new project shortly, assessing both the numbers and quality of Welsh medical practice. I have a theory that, like so many other parts of Welsh medical history, there is a lot more to discover, and some deeply-held myths to challenge.

Constructing the Sufferer (part 1)

I’ve always been interested in the ways that people construct narratives of sickness, and the sickness persona. I was watching a comedian recently who brought up the subject of the ‘phoning in sick’ voice; the slightly husky, weak and tired tone people adopt when they have to convince the boss that they really are ill, and not having a ‘duvet day’. One day there’s going to have to be a study of the language and art of phoning in sick – stuff like having been ‘up all night’ being ill, ‘really don’t think I can make it in today’, ‘see how I feel tomorrow’ are all stalwarts. But sufferers have always constructed and deployed sickness in some measure. When I was researching for my book I looked at petitions by the sick poor in the seventeenth century, written to try and convince the parish authorities to give them money.

Consider this example written to a wealthy lady in Cardiganshire in the eighteenth century – the spelling is original. (National Library of Wales, MS 182D)

“Madam Lloyd, by submission to your Honour, my little grand Child whome I nurs’d since he was a year old, happen to fell sick, this day fortneight (sic), and had been very low, I hope that he begin to recover. He is longing for rosted meat that ever he had in my cottage, and I sure that he cannot distinguies between any sort of rosted meat. If your honour please to send a bit, or order me to wait for it, I will be very glad and in so doing you will add to the obligation of your honest old shoemaker, and your most humble servant, John Jenkin, alias, little shoemaker”

Here, we have the heart-wrenching tale of a sick [and presumably orphaned] child, desperately ill and longing for something substantial to eat. The writer of the letter appeals to the charitable nature of ‘Madam Lloyd’, but it is interesting to note the language used, of the humble, honest old shoemaker, trying to use whatever personal connections he has to secure something for his grandchild.

Others appealed to the charitable nature of people in their surrounding areas to provide support or relief (National Library of Wales, MS 434B):

“To all faithfull people to whome it doth appeare or may concerne, 3^rd October 1656

Whereas John Owen, being a poore ould man borne and breed in the parish of Llanfydd being grievously troubled with a disease…that he is not able to travel and seeke or get his bodily foode & sustenance by reason it is broken out in several places of his body, the quantity of seven or eight places…so beseeching all good and charitable people out of charitie to commiserate his distressed state to bestow their benevolence towards payment to the churgeon…”

Another, Mary Jones of Llandenny, petitioned the parish to offer her support as her husband had fallen sick for ‘five quarters of a year’ and was ‘sick now’. Unable to raise the money herself to feed her family, and facing eviction from her cottage on the waste by the Duchess of Beaufort “to punish the poor man in spite and malice’, Mary was forced into desperate measures.

It is interesting to note, though, that although occasionally such letters were written by the parties involved themselves, they were more often written by an amanuensis – someone who knew the people involved but had more skill in writing. These notes are usually deliberately constructed to emphasise the individual’s suffering. They often highlight the symptoms and use emotive language to highlight the particular suffering.

The reasons for this are clear; the petitioner wanted and needed money, and thus needed to convince the authorities that their need was special. They make interesting reading not just for the language of sickness, but for the ways that it could be deliberately deployed.

I think there could be another post to follow on the ‘heroic sufferer’, but enough for today!