WERE handwritten medicinal recipes used more than 300 years ago?

Local consultant medical herbalist and university lecturer, Anne Stobart, set out to establish whether manuscript recipe collections reflected actual practice in self-help healthcare in the seventeenth-century.

Anne has now completed her thesis entitled The Making of Domestic Medicine: Gender, Self-Help and Therapeutic Determination in Household Healthcare in South-West England in the Late Seventeenth Century.

She was recently awarded her PhD by Middlesex University for this study, based on family and household records of the late 17th-century in South West England.

Recipe collections with both medicinal and culinary uses still survive from many households in the seventeenth century. However, there has been limited research into the nature of domestic medicine in this period and so Anne set out to investigate the evidence for household healthcare.

By comparing handwritten recipes with household accounts and letters, Anne identified those which were most likely to have been used and also who was involved in healthcare.

Her findings challenge some of our assumptions about the use of these recipes, extent of self-help in healthcare and the role of women.

When there was illness in the household there were varied strategies for managing health, and men were often actively involved alongside women. Surprisingly, perhaps, the range of medicines made at home at this time appeared to be quite restricted to a small number of favourite preparations.

Even the use of garden and wild plants involved extra expense on labour to collect and process items. Plant identification skills were also needed. In the later 17th century it seems that in some households far more medicines were purchased than prepared.

This study into the history of medicine helps to explain the gendered shaping of domestic medicine and the relationship of household healthcare to medical authority and the developing commercial and professional medical market in the 18th century.

For Anne it has been a lengthy project completed part-time while continuing to teach and practise as a medical herbalist.

She says she would like to thank many people, including the staff in local Record Offices, who went out of their way to help her to access local archives.

Her next project involves linking up with other researchers to form a Herbal Medicine Historical Research Network to encourage more scholarly research in this field.

Anne is currently Director of Programmes for Complementary Health Sciences at Middlesex University in London. Her role involves co-ordination of practitioner training in various professionally accredited courses including acupuncture, Ayurvedic medicine, herbal medicine, traditional Chinese medicine.

For more information about professional training see http://www.mdx.ac.uk/cmh">www.mdx.ac.uk/cmh .