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Introduction - Almanacs and the Literature of Popular Health in Early America
- University of Massachusetts Press
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1 INTRODUCTION ALMANACS AND THE LITERATURE OF POPULAR HEALTH IN EARLY AMERICA A historian of early American almanacs once lamented that modern versions of the genre are the “degenerate offspring of respected ancestors whose contents were not primarily advertisements for hair-growing and itch-relieving potions.” Marion Barber Stowell’s critical remarks, expressed in a 1983 article, echo those made almost a century earlier by another historian of almanacs, Samuel Briggs. The almanac’s columns abound with “the virtues of pills, potions and plasters,” Briggs complained , “interspersed with views of our internal economy calculated to make the well man ill, and the invalid to relax his grasp on the thread of life.”1 Stowell’s assessment of almanacs in the 1980s is exaggeration, but Briggs’s review of the genre in the late nineteenth century is less so. By the time Briggs issued his searing indictment, the almanac trade was dominated by proprietary medicine firms and pharmaceutical companies. Briggs and Stowell wrote wistfully of a world that had been lost, a pre–Civil War world in which almanacs offered their readers not various brands of hair-growing and itch-relieving nostrums but advice, enlightenment , and entertainment. It was a world in which Poor Richard, Merry Andrew, Timothy Telescope, Abraham Weatherwise, Copernicus Weatherguesser , and Dick Astronomer passed along farming tips, anecdotes, astrology, humor, maxims, weather predictions, and health advice. Because the almanac of this world offered something for almost everyone 2 INTRODUCTION and almost everyone could afford to purchase one, it was, in the words of Briggs, an “honored guest at every fireside.”2 Briggs and Stowell—as well as others—have ardently proclaimed the almanac’s importance as a valuable resource for the study of popular culture in America from the colonial period to the Civil War.3 While I disagree with Briggs and Stowell’s apparent dismissals of later almanacs—specifically proprietary medicine almanacs—as unworthy of scholarly attention, I heartily concur with their shared belief in the value to historians of those published before 1860.4 Because its popularity spread through almost every level of American society, the almanac was, in effect, a microcosm of that society. The almanac, more than any other genre of print (with the possible exception of the newspaper), provides a lens through which scholars can examine American popular culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the first half of the nineteenth.5 Almanacs are indispensable resources for the study of lay medical beliefs and practices in early America. I argue in this study that a better understanding of popular attitudes concerning the body, health, and disease and the behaviors and practices these attitudes informed can be achieved by examining health advice presented in American almanacs published before the Civil War. American almanacs contained several forms of health and medical information, such as descriptions of various herbs and plants and explanations of how to use them, essays on current and recent epidemics, extracts from lay and professional medical publications , proprietary medical advertisements, and health advice. In the chapters that follow, I examine the three main categories of health advice presented in early American almanacs: astrological guidance, “cures” or remedies for various ailments, and prescribed or proscribed behaviors (regimen advice) for preserving health and ensuring long life. The genre already had a long history by 1639, the year this country’s first almanac was printed in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The almanac in its seventeenth-century guise was a composite of three chronological devices that dated to antiquity. It was a calendar or list of days of the week and months that noted church festivals and saints’ days, an almanac consisting of astronomical and astrological compilations of the passage of time, and a prognostication comprising astrological predictions of political and social events. America’s first almanacs, sometimes referred to as “Cambridge” or “Harvard” almanacs because they were compiled by [3.229.122.112] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 08:54 GMT) INTRODUCTION 3 Harvard graduates or graduate students and printed in Cambridge, Massachusetts , by a press controlled by Harvard College, resembled English almanacs in certain ways. Like their English counterparts, most American almanacs issued during the seventeenth century included a preface, a calendar, information on eclipses and other astronomical phenomena, and a list of local court and fair dates.6 There were significant differences, however, between Harvard and English almanacs. The former, compiled by staunch supporters of Puritan orthodoxy, replaced saints’ and feast days with important historical dates and identified months with numbers...