Southern Folk Medicine, 1750-1820 (review)

Kay K. Moss. Southern Folk Medicine, 1750-1820. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. xv + 259 pp. Ill. $29.95.

This volume is compiled from thirteen manuscript collections (mostly commonplace books) and from a scatter of other sources that include "William Buchan's Domestic Medicine, and John Wesley's Primitive Physick . . . John Quincy's English Dispensatory, the Edinburgh New Dispensatory, Benjamin Smith Barton's and William Cullen's materia medicas, and Culpeper's herbal" (p. 18). The account, mostly on treatments, is arranged according to general therapies, patent medicines, acute diseases, chronic internal and external complaints, disorders of the senses, women's disorders, nervous diseases, and so on.

The author makes clear the limitation of the manuscript material: "It is quite predictable that a dozen people consulting the same half dozen reference books and drawing on experience and advice from disassociated sets of friends and acquaintances would compile very different collections of cures . . . we know only that these are medical receipts that someone considered interesting and potentially useful. There is seldom any assurance that these remedies were ever tried by the manuscript authors" (p. 17). As fascinating as the volume is for general interest reading, the limitation of the manuscripts undermines its scholarly usefulness. This might have been offset by a more critical evaluation of the source material. For instance, Moss might have asked whether any Southern distinctiveness can be discerned, as raised in the volume edited by Todd L. Savitt and James Harvey Young, Disease and Distinctiveness in the American South (1988). Although Moss mentions plants that became very much part of Southern folk medicine--such as "3 Kinds of Rattle-Snake Root made into Doses in Case of Need" (p. 23), pleurisy root (p. 62), seneka snakeroot (p. 63), and pinkroot (p. 78)--they do not seem to have been prominent in the manuscript sources. Thus we do not know if these sources can be said to contribute to anything more than eighteenth-century medicine in the South rather than to "Southern folk medicine."

Perhaps, too, a quantitative review of the manuscripts might have uncovered some patterns of recommendations--and perhaps more on the influences of Culpeper, Buchan, and Wesley--so as to give a clearer sense of an emerging oral Southern tradition. This oral tradition, as the author makes clear, existed alongside and interwove with the written tradition so evident in the manuscripts.

Part 3, "A Domestic Materia Medica," provides an invaluable annotated list of "ingredients drawn from pre-1820 domestic remedies in the American South" (p. 165). However, the usefulness of the eclectic list could have been enhanced in various ways. First, it is unfortunate that not all items are entered in the indexes (there is a general index and an index of Latin names). Second, Moss could have indicated how she chose entries for the list. Surprisingly, perhaps, while use was made of Benjamin Smith Barton's important, early commentary on American medicinal plants, Collections for an Essay towards a Materia Medica of the United States (1798 and 1810), some plants mentioned there as growing in the South are omitted from Moss's list (e.g., corn). Moreover, she notes that "a cultural unity can be demonstrated throughout the backcountry--from the rural communities of Pennsylvania [Barton's home state] south through the interior regions of Virginia and the Carolinas into Georgia" (p. 218).

Third, the utility of the annotated list could have been furthered if some comparisons had been made between the manuscript data and modern compilations of folk medicines. In fact, some of the most important of these are not mentioned in the bibliography--such as Wayland Hand, ed., The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore (1952-64), and Judith L. Bolyard, Medicinal Plants and Home Remedies of Appalachia (1981). This suggestion obviously goes beyond the intention of the author, but with much information now available, perhaps a responsibility exists for authors to offer some synthesis when providing...