To these names must be added, as sustaining a certain relation to the healing art, that of the first Governor Winthrop, who is said by John Cotton to have been "Help for our Bodies by Physick [and] for our Estates by Law," and that of his son, the Governor of Connecticut, who, as we shall see, was as much physician as magistrate.
I had submitted to me for examination, in 1862, a manuscript found among the Winthrop Papers, marked with the superscription, "For my worthy friend Mr. Wintrop," dated in 1643, London, signed Edward Stafford, and containing medical directions and prescriptions. It may be remembered by some present that I wrote a report on this paper, which was published in the "Proceedings" of this Society.
Whether the paper was written for Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts, or for his son, Governor John of Connecticut, there is no positive evidence that I have been able to obtain. It is very interesting, however, as giving short and simple practical directions, such as would be most like to be wanted and most useful, in the opinion of a physician in repute of that day.
The diseases prescribed for are plague, small-pox, fevers, king's evil, insanity, falling-sickness, and the like; with such injuries as broken bones, dislocations, and burning with gunpowder. The remedies are of three kinds: simples, such as St. John's wort, Clown's all- heal, elder, parsley, maidenhair, mineral drugs, such as lime, saltpetre, Armenian bole, crocus metallorum, or sulphuret of antimony; and thaumaturgic or mystical, of which the chief is, "My black powder against the plague, small-pox; purples, all sorts of feavers; Poyson; either, by Way of Prevention or after Infection."
This marvellous remedy was made by putting live toads into an earthen pot so as to half fill it, and baking and burning them "in the open ayre, not in an house,"--concerning which latter possibility I suspect Madam Winthrop would have had something to say,--until they could be reduced by pounding, first into a brown, and then into a black, powder. Blood-letting in some inflammations, fasting in the early stage of fevers, and some of those peremptory drugs with which most of us have been well acquainted in our time, the infragrant memories of which I will not pursue beyond this slight allusion, are among his remedies.
The Winthrops, to one of whom Dr. Stafford's directions were addressed, were the medical as well as the political advisers of their fellow-citizens for three or four successive generations. One of them, Governor John of Connecticut, practised so extensively, that, but for his more distinguished title in the State, he would have been remembered as the Doctor. The fact that he practised in another colony, for the most part, makes little difference in the value of the records we have of his medical experience, which have fortunately been preserved, and give a very fair idea, in all probability, of the way in which patients were treated in Massachusetts, when they fell into intelligent and somewhat educated hands, a little after the middle of the seventeenth century:
I have before me, while writing, a manuscript collection of the medical cases treated by him, and recorded at the time in his own hand, which has been intrusted to me by our President, his descendant.
They are generally marked Hartford, and extend from the year 1657 to 1669. From these, manuscripts, and from the letters printed in the Winthrop Papers published by our Society, I have endeavored to obtain some idea of the practice of Governor John Winthrop, Junior. The learned eye of Mr. Pulsifer would have helped me, no doubt, as it has done in other cases; but I have ventured this time to attempt finding my own way among the hieroglyphics of these old pages. By careful comparison of many prescriptions, and by the aid of Schroder, Salmon, Culpeper, and other old compilers, I have deciphered many of his difficult paragraphs with their mysterious recipes.
The Governor employed a number of the simples dear to ancient women, --elecampane and elder and wormwood and anise and the rest; but he also employed certain mineral remedies, which he almost always indicates by their ancient symbols, or by a name which should leave them a mystery to the vulgar. I am now prepared to reveal the mystic secrets of the Governor's beneficent art, which rendered so many good and great as well as so many poor and dependent people his debtors,- at least, in their simple belief,--for their health and their lives.
His great remedy, which he gave oftener than any other, was nitre; which he ordered in doses of twenty or thirty grains to adults, and of three grains to infants. Measles, colics, sciatica, headache, giddiness, and many other ailments, all found themselves treated, and I trust bettered, by nitre; a pretty safe medicine in moderate doses, and one not likely to keep the good Governor awake at night, thinking whether it might not kill, if it did not cure. We may say as much for spermaceti, which he seems to have considered "the sovereign'st thing on earth" for inward bruises, and often prescribes after falls and similar injuries.
One of the next remedies, in point of frequency, which he was in the habit of giving, was (probably diaphoretic) antimony; a mild form of that very active metal, and which, mild as it was, left his patients very commonly with a pretty strong conviction that they had been taking something that did not exactly agree with them. Now and then he gave a little iron or sulphur or calomel, but very rarely; occasionally, a good, honest dose of rhubarb or jalap; a taste of stinging horseradish, oftener of warming guiacum; sometimes an anodyne, in the shape of mithridate,--the famous old farrago, which owed its virtue to poppy juice; [This is the remedy which a Boston divine tried to simplify. See Electuarium Novum Alexipharmacum, by Rev. Thomas Harward, lecturer at the Royal Chappell. Boston, 1732.
