Recently I
was scanning old family photographs and came across on which showed a very
attractive girl somewhere between 18-25 years of age and on the back was
written “Lyman’s daughter died young.” Somehow this got me thinking about what
may have caused her untimely death. Maybe it was just a trip to the doctor.
Back in
Lyman’s daughter’s day, the mid to late 1800s, the popular cure for whatever
ailed you from a toothache to fatigue was Dr. Rush’s Bilious Pills or more commonly
known as Dr. Rush’s Thunderbolts. This
amazing cure all pill contained two powerful herbal laxatives and mercury. Thunderbolts worked on the simple property of
clearing out your entire system at the first signs of illness which would
restore the humors to a natural balance. If
that did not work you could always go to Dr. Rush next favorite cure of bloodletting.
High levels of mercury and bloodletting
sounds like more of a way to do away with someone not cure them.
I guess it
could have been worse she could have lived in the 16th and 17th
centuries when people use astronomy and something known as the Doctrine of Signatures to cure your ailments. Now I
will admit I not sure how astronomy fit into the use of the Doctrine of Signatures,
but the herbal part I find interesting and quite scary. It dates back all the way to the middle
ages when folk medicine doctors would look at plants’ characteristics, i.e.
leaf shape, root color, which would tell them what types of things those plants
would cure. For example if you happened
to have kidney or gall stones you would have been prescribed a tea steeped from
the leaves of the saxifrage plant. Saxifrage plants commonly grow in rock cracks,
so they were thought to have the power to break up stones. While plants with
heart shaped leaves were thought to be good for curing heart ailments. Many of the plants listed in Nicholas Culpeper’s book on herbal medicine really do have medical benefits, but following
some of rules of the Doctrine of Signatures could have killed you.
A Native
American medicine man I once spent some time with was asked, as a person
pointed to a common plant with heart shaped leaves, if it cured anything and
with a glint in his eye he said “yeah, your enemies.” This particular plant has chemical which are
known to cause heart failure and respiratory arrest. When this Native American
tribe knew that their enemies were nearby they would leave their camp with a
pot of meat boiling in water with the leaves of the plant in question on the campfire.
Their enemies would sneak in and steal the unguarded meat which later on after
eating it would cause certain death.
So how did we weed out all those potentially
lethal plants? If you died while being treated you were considered to have
suffered from a failure to thrive. How many people failed to thrive before we
realized it was the “cure” that killed them?
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