Popular Print and Popular Medicine: Almanacs and Health Advice in Early America (review)

Since Charles Rosenberg first began providing us with thicker historical descriptions of nineteenth-century American medical culture, there has been a desire, as there is with virtually any historical category or era, to offer as complete a picture as is humanly possible given the gaps and vicissitudes of the historical archive. Where once the rise of medical orthodoxy and establishment of regular physicians practicing scientific medicine stood for the whole, gradually there emerged a much more complex and interesting picture. Discussions of breakthroughs in medical science such as the discovery of microbes or of ether as an anesthetic have been complicated by a world in which sectarian practitioners, health reformers, and a vast array of healers competed with and challenged the authority of regular physicians.

A similar trajectory has animated the last thirty years of nineteenth century American literary history as it has moved from a relative prioritization of canonical authors toward the broad cultural terrain of popular literature and culture. Where once the discourse was squarely focused upon the large literary figures of the period, now there is a dramatically altered landscape populated with analyses of the commonplace as much as the distinguished. Where once there was selected works of literary history, now there reside the complex variegations of print culture.

At the intersection of these two historiographical trends sits Thomas A. Horrocks' Popular Print and Popular Medicine Almanacs and Health Advice in Early America. In this monograph the author contends that almanacs are "indispensable resources for the study of lay medical beliefs and practices in early America" (2). The health advice, herbal and botanical information, cures and remedies, discussions of epidemics, diet and regimen, and astrological prognostications promulgated by almanacs afford a better understanding of popular attitudes toward the body, health, and disease from the colonial era to the outbreak of the Civil War. The almanac was also one of the iron horses of print culture. Every publishing center in the colonies and early years of the Republic produced them, and as Horrocks points out, in an era when most literary forms had miniscule print runs, an almanac could easily attain annual circulations in the tens of thousands, as did Franklin's, and as many as sixty thousand in the case of Nathaniel Ames.

"No one," wrote Moses Tyler in an early literary history of the United States, "who would penetrate to the core of early American literature, and would read in it the secret history of the people in whose minds it took root and from whose minds it grew, may by any means turn away, in lofty literary scorn, from the almanac,—most despised, most prolific, most indispensable of books, which every man uses, and no man praises."¹ And in a sense, Tyler's assertion is Horrock's charge: to use the almanac to gain access to, as it were, "the secret history of the people" by way of "popular attitudes concerning the body, health, and disease" (15).

To this end, Horrocks consulted nearly 1,800 almanacs published between 1646 and 1861 (analyzed in a useful appendix), and despite the miscellaneous nature of his quarry, he helpfully organizes the materials found in this massive inquiry around four basic categories to which he devotes separate chapters: medical astrological prediction, home therapeutics, preventative regimens, and health promotionals (those advocating specific or proprietary medicines or regimens). Taken as whole, almanacs reveal a kind of thick description of how humoral medicine, with its Galenic systems of bodily humors, and its therapeutics of bloodletting and purgation, shared and disseminated itself throughout the population in the new world, how it persisted, and how it was altered, as modern medical regimens came into play, and eventually, prominence. In each of these chapters, one finds all kinds of fascinating and curious artifacts of the humoral world. In the chapter on astrological medicine, images of "Anatomy" or "Zodiac Man" (which have a decidedly medieval look to...