A History of Medicine

An unconventional removal of warts

In 1615, a man called Gervase Markham decided to write a book on household management called “The English Housewife”. In it, Markham laid out everything that a wife should know how to do, from cooking to distilling to spinning. And he gave pride of place to “physic”, the old word for medicine. 

As far as Markham was concerned, curing ailments within the home was the responsibility of women. And it was a very important responsibility. However, not all women foraged for medicinal plants and made their own cures. In the absence of GPs, people often turned to members of their community who had a reputation as healers. Many of these local healers were women. They were known as Wise Women or Cunning Folk. Again, knowledge was passed down orally from one generation to the next, or acquired through trial and error. Most of these practitioners were illiterate and used rhymes to remember their recipes. 

Sometimes, medical practice crossed over into magical thinking. One branch of folk medicine was wart-charming, which sufferers believed would rid them of their warts. First, they were told to prick their wart with a pin. Then, stick it to the bark of an ash tree while chanting: “Ashen tree, ashen tree, Pray buy these warts from me”. Supposedly, their warts would then magically transfer into the tree, though we haven’t tried it ourselves, so we can’t guarantee it will work!

The first plaster

In 1920, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, recently married housewife Josephine Knight was preparing dinner for her husband, Earle. Josephine wasn’t exactly an expert with the kitchen knife—it was a wedding present, and the blade was very sharp. While dicing some vegetables, the knife slipped, slicing deeply into her finger.

Earle heard her cry out and rushed in to see what the matter was. Josephine held out her wounded hand. Earle instructed her to hold her finger under the tap while he searched for a way to stem the bleeding. This wasn’t the first domestic accident the newlyweds had suffered. A few days previous, Josephine had burnt her other hand on a pan, and Earle’s home improvement experiments had left him with cuts and nicks of his own. But this was the worst one yet.

Luckily, it just so happened that Earle worked as a cotton buyer for the pharmaceutical company Johnson and Johnson. He’d been considering these little household mishaps and thought he may have devised a solution. The night before, he brought home a sample of surgical tape from work. He cut off a strip and laid it on the kitchen table, sticky side up. Next, he cut out a small section of gauze bandage and stuck it in the middle of the surgical tape. He dried Josephine’s wound with some cotton wool, then placed the strip of tape with its bandage pad over it. And just like that, Earle Knight invented the sticking plaster. The next day, he took the idea to work and presented it to the marketing department. They came up with the name Band-Aid.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Drugs as medicine in Victorian London

In 1849, in Victorian London, a mother regarded her nine-month-old baby girl with concern. She was thrashing about in her cot, her cheeks turning progressively more red as she tossed her head from side to side, pulling on the lobe of one ear. The poor thing was teething – a perfectly normal phase in child development, but like any doting mother, the woman didn’t like to see her baby suffer. Not when she had something to ease the child’s pain and restore peace to the house.

She opened her medicine cabinet and pulled out a bottle of medicine advertised as suitable for small children—Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup—along with a glass pipette.

The woman managed to squirt a few drops of the syrup into her daughter’s mouth. Almost immediately, the baby stopped fretting. A moment later, she was sleeping soundly. The woman sighed with relief – Mrs Winslow had never let her down yet. Hardly surprising, given that this widely marketed children’s medicine contained morphine.

In the Victorian era, opium was the miracle drug, a cure-all for every ailment - from a migraine to a cough you couldn’t shake off, or rheumatic aches and menstrual cramps. Opium-based medicines were freely available without a prescription. As you’ve seen, opioids were even given to restless children. The problem was, it calmed them down too much. Opium-addicted babies slept for days. They also stopped feeding. In the end, many died of starvation, especially in poor households.

In 1868, the British Parliament introduced the Pharmacy Act, which limited the sale of opium-based medicines to licensed pharmacists. But, rather bizarrely, the law excluded patent medicines such as Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup. Opium was even recommended in one of the most influential books on household management ever written – Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, published in 1859.