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146 11 mediCinal uses of plants A smaller, though important, part of the colonial agricultural economy in which European settlers, Native Americans, and slaves participated involved the uses of plants for medicinal purposes, a general area often mentioned in eighteenthcentury travel accounts but largely unexplored in available scholarship.1 The medical historian Kay K. Moss uses twelve previously unpublished sources to explore “homespun remedies” and practices primarily in the backcountry of the Carolinas.2 The ethnobotanist Walter C. Holmes investigates the “folk botany” of contemporary French-speaking areas in Louisiana but does not necessarily explore Native American and historical names or uses of native plants.3 Both note problems inherent in their investigations with botanical nomenclature, obsolete terms, antiquated ideas, and colloquial spellings. For instance, Holmes states that in French Louisiana , “most medicinal uses were either acquired from the Indians or were known from similar plants familiar to French-speaking people” and that “most of the ethno -botany of French Louisiana is merely a collection of names, with few medicinal uses. . . . A large percentage were borrowed from Indian names or corrupted from English, Spanish, or Latin names of plants. The names of French origin were either applied to the same or very similar plants already known to French-speaking people , or in many cases, applied to plants that appear similar but are not at all related botanically.”4 While there are stumbling blocks to a full comprehension of medical uses of local plants, works such as these inform an understanding of period practices . It is commonly thought that the Ursuline Convent in New Orleans, dating from the 1720s, had a herb garden, and that one of the duties of the Ursuline nuns was to tend the sick with potions developed from what grew there. Early maps indicate gardens near the convent and the colony’s church, and an eighteenth-century general instruction manual from the Ursuline Order gives generic, nonspecific instructions for a garden and related activities.5 Over the years various plant lists of the convent herb garden or from the colonial period have circulated, but no list has ever been fully documented with colonial sources.6 Having lived for several years with the Natchez Indians, Le Page du Pratz discusses in detail his exposure to Indian medicine, drawn from both personal and anecdotal experiences. He found it much more efficacious than French treatments, noting: “These are facts well known in the colony. The physicians of the country have performed many other cures, which, if they were to be all related, would Medicinal Uses of Plants 147 require a whole volume apart; but I have confined myself to the three above mentioned , in order to shew that disorders frequently accounted almost incurable, are, without any painful operation, and in a short time, cured by physicians, native of Louisiana.”7 Along with discussions of plant characteristics and household uses, Le Page du Pratz also presents medical applications of local plants. Mention of three examples will suffice here: one is the “rattle-snake-herb” (herbe à serpent à sonnette in the original text; Sida spinosa L., Indian mallow or Indian hemp). When bitten by a rattlesnake, a person should immediately “take a root, bite off part of it, chew it for some time, and apply it to the wound,” and in several hours the poison will be extracted, “and no bad consequences need be apprehended.” Another is “ground-ivy,” a plant not botanically described, which “is said by natives to possess many more virtues than are known to our botanists.” It eases women in labor, it cures ulcers, and, as a remedy for the headache, “a considerable quantity of its leaves bruised, and laid as a cataplasm upon the head, quickly removes the pain.” In discussing the merits of the native “myrtle wax-tree” (wax myrtle, Myrica cerifera ) in producing wax for candles (“it lasts longer than that of France”), he notes that “the astringent quality likewise renders it an admirable specific against a dysentery or looseness.” These remedies likely came from Indian sources, as both Sida spinosa and Myrica cerifera are native to North America and not commonly found in France, and they represent medical practices and remedies characteristic of the times; the difference is, of course, these practices came from native rather than European sources.8 At least one colonial historian has suggested that slaves from the Caribbean Islands and Africa, having brought expertise regarding medical uses of plants from their homelands, commonly served as surgeons and doctors. While little evidence...

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