Popular Print and Popular Medicine: Almanacs and Health Advice in Early America

Chapter 2. Advice for the Afflicted

42 2 ADVICE FOR THE AFFLICTED In addition to astrological advice, early American almanacs offered remedies for various ailments and regimen prescriptions for health and long life. This chapter examines remedies or “cures” offered by American almanacs for dropsy, dysentery, and rheumatism, three afflictions that were common among Americans between 1750 and 1860, and presents several examples that demonstrate the similarity between these remedies and those offered by other genres of print and domestic manuscript recipe and remedy books. The almanac was just one of several sources to which early Americans would have turned for therapeutic advice. What, then, was its role in popular therapeutics? What influence, if any, did it have in shaping popular assumptions concerning the body, health, and disease? What influence did these assumptions have on the almanac? Of the pre-1860 American general almanacs consulted for this study, less than 30 percent contain therapeutic advice. This figure is misleading , however, when one considers the fact that this type of advice did not begin to appear in almanacs with any regularity until the middle of the eighteenth century. From the 1750s to 1860, the percentages of almanacs that offered therapeutic advice increased to about 40 percent and even higher in the middle-Atlantic and southern parts of the country .1 This advice covered a variety of afflictions, ranging from common bruises, colds, corns, earaches, headaches, and warts to more serious and potentially life-threatening complaints such as dropsy, whooping cough, ADVICE FOR THE AFFLICTED 43 consumption, “bloody flux” (dysentery), bladder stones, and various fevers. These remedies tended to emphasize the medicinal properties of plants, herbs, nuts, and barks that were readily available to lay practitioners , though it was not uncommon for a reader to encounter remedies composed of animal substances and a variety of chemical and mineral ingredients. Several almanacs described the medicinal uses of various herbs and plants, but most did not, probably assuming that either their readers already knew this information or they could readily find it elsewhere .2 While many remedies appear to have been supplied by almanac compilers or printers or borrowed from other published sources, such as newspapers, domestic health guides, and other almanacs, some were contributed by almanac readers. The remedies found in early American almanacs—like those encountered in other general and health-related publications of the time—were informed by shared assumptions concerning the body, health, and disease that were profoundly influenced by the theory of humoralism. Humoralism , which originated with the Hippocratic School and was later formalized by Galen (129–ca. 210), interpreted health as a natural balance of the body’s humors (yellow bile, blood, phlegm, and black bile) and their respective elements or qualities (hot and dry, hot and moist, cold and moist, cold and dry). The body was viewed in holistic terms; all parts were interrelated. Thus, when one part of the body was disrupted by disease, the rest of the body was also affected. The body was also viewed as an equilibrium system that constantly interacted with its environment. This interaction was visible in the body’s system of intake and outgo, a process through which the body constantly strove to achieve a harmonious balance of its humors. Illness was the result not of a specific disease but of humoral imbalance. Humoral imbalance was caused by too much or too little of one or more elements or qualities. For example, an overabundance of heat indicated the presence of fever in the body; conversely, the absence of heat in the body implied the presence of a “cold.” Health was restored when balance was restored; prolonged imbalance, however, could lead to death. The primary role of therapeutics, then, was to restore balance by treating the symptoms of imbalance. Treatment meant administering medicines with properties opposite to those associated with the humoral imbalance. Thus a drug exhibiting “hot” properties would have been used to alleviate an overabundance of “cold” in the body. A drug would also be administered to aid in restoring balance. Balance was restored 44 ADVICE FOR THE AFFLICTED by depleting the system through a variety of measures, such as bleeding , administering cathartics (to induce defecation), diuretics (to induce urination), and emetics (to induce vomiting); or by strengthening the system through the use of restorative measures that included narcotics and tonics. The remedies encountered in early American almanacs comprised plant, vegetable, animal, chemical, and mineral substances that...