Household Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England by Anne Stobart (review)

In Household Medicine, Anne Stobart works to “question assumptions about household healthcare and to expose both the importance of household medicine and [the] complexity of self-help” (p. 174). The book is organized into three sections and seven chapters, arranged according to genre, materials, and the care of the body. Stobart’s focus throughout is on England, with particular attention to the southwest of the country; most sources date to the second half of the seventeenth century, with select and comparative accounts from the late sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries. One of the book’s major strengths lies in its source base. Four sets of family records anchor the book: the papers of Mary and Edward Clarke (Somerset), Lord and Lady Clifford (Devon), Bridget and Hugh Fortescue (Devon), and Anne Strode (Dorset). All of these families were wealthy, at least in comparison to most early modern British families. All four families employed servants, and most had multiple residences. And three of the four families had large numbers of children, who—like children both past and present—required frequent and diligent medical attention. All of these socioeconomic and demographic advantages allowed Stobart’s historical subjects to purchase or manufacture medicines whenever and wherever they needed them, to provide medical care to the members of their sprawling and expansive families, and to write at length about these experiences in their family papers.

Stobart’s sources are thus exceptionally well chosen, and the author makes very good use of the letters, pieces of advice, recipe books, descriptions of gifts sent and received, prescriptive instruction, and household accounts that have survived in each family’s papers. This is particularly the case for two types of sources: recipe books and account books. These types of sources—too often underused and underexamined by most historians—can be incredibly revealing, but as Stobart masterfully compares and juxtaposes them, they offer fresh and remarkable insights into the practice of early modern medicine. Stobart is able to compare the medicines in a family’s recipe book with the family’s actual expenditures over several decades, tracing how often medicines were made, how much they cost, how their ingredients were sourced, and how prices fluctuated over time. The results, analyzed in the text of Household Medicine and also listed in its expansive appendix, challenge many of our assumptions about early modern medicine and markets. We might like to imagine early modern people as somehow more connected to or in tune with their native, local, “farm-to-table” natural environments. But as Stobart shows, this wasn’t how it worked. Gleaning and gathering of wild specimens was rare. When families grew ingredients at home, these plants were sold on at harvest, allowing the family to profit immediately from its agricultural investment. Although prescription dictated that families cultivate medical herbs and plants in their gardens, most purchased ingredients for medicines. A majority of these ingredients were imported and nonnative, sourced from forests and farms in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Mediterranean worlds.

These are invaluable insights, and they help to puncture our romanticized ideas about the connections between early modern medicine and early modern agriculture. Both enterprises required dangerous, difficult labor. Much of this work was performed by lower status people, who were then systematically denied access to the foods and medicines they helped to produce. Stobart addresses the ways that higher status employers meted out medicines to lower status servants and the poor in two sections of chapter 6, “Therapeutics in the Family.” Although advice literature urged wealthy people to offer medicines and medical care to lower status neighbors, and encouraged them to think of servants as members of the family, most elites approached the poor grudgingly, if at all. Stobart shows that medicines were almost never prepared for the poor. And I suspect that even when medicines were given to servants, they might have been older, leftover, and less expensive remedies. This is not the central concern of Stobart’s book, but...