The Midwest pioneer, his ills, cures, & doctors - University Library ...

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^ For background of almost four thousand years of folk medicine
see bibliographical essay. An excellent brief survey is Loren MacKinney,
"The Vulture in Ancient Medical Lore ... in the Medieval World
. . . and in the Modern World," a series of three articles in Ciha
Symposia, IV, 3 (June, 1942).
^ The Badianus Manuscript, translated and annotated by Emily
Walcott Emmart (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1940). For comment
on the literature of herbals see bibliographical note.
* Francesco Hernandez (1514 -1587), personal physician to Philip
II, at the King's request, explored the New World, 1570-77, for plants
and medicines. In this work he accumulated twenty-six foUo volumes
of notes and drawings. An abridged edition of these was published in
Rome in the seventeenth century. The originals were destroyed by fire
in 1611. Much of the knowledge acquired by Hernandez was incorporated
in Francisco Ximinez's Four Books on the Nature and Medicinal
Properties of the 'Plants and Animals FouttJ in New Spain, which
appeared in Mexico in 1615.
^ Contrast with the Pennsylvania German theory: the leaves of boneset
stripped upward act as an emetic, downward as a purgative. Edward
Miller Fogel, Beliefs and Superstitions of the Pennsylvania Germans
(Philadelphia, 1915), 278.
^ The Aztec recipe was white incense, earth of a decomposed corpse,
well ground up in dragon's blood and white of egg, and applied to the
temple. Badianus Manuscript, plate 13.
Nicholas Culpepper, in his The English Physician— Enlarged, A
"^
Compleat Method of Physick, whereby a Man may preserve his Body
in Health or Cure himself, being sick, with things only as grow in
England, they being most fit for English Bodies, 1704, had set forth
the idea that every region of the earth produced indigenously the curative
plants necessary for any disease there prevalent.
Remedies of the vegetable kingdom in use in colonial times, according
to Dr. Rufus W. Griswold of Rock Hill, Connecticut, in Alexander
Wilder's History of Medicine. . . . (New Sharon, Maine, 1901),
406-7, included the following: yellow dock, sarsaparilla, wintergreen,
birch bark, elecampano, comfrey, sassafras, plantain, whitewood, dandelion,
snake-root, hardback, horseradish, peppermint, spearmint, red
peppers, Indian tobacco, wormwood, tansy, yarrow, star-grass, marshmallow,
Indian hemp, wild ginger, mullein, pink-root, nightshade, barberry,
sweet flag, catnip, wormseed, golden thread, dogwood, skunkcabbage,
bittersweet, slippery elm, boneset or thoroughwort, blue gentian,
crane's bill, pennyroyal, frostwort, henbane, blue flag, butternut
bark, juniper berries, burdock, wild cherry bark, flaxseed, pumpkin
seeds, parsley root. May apple, black alder, elderberries, white oak bark,
sumach berries, rosemary, blackberry root, willow bark, sage, blood-root,
skull-cap, seneca, mustard, golden rod, queen's root, stramonium seeds.