A Dose of Nature: The Herbalists of Forgottonia

By - Harry Bulkeley

"Lands o' goshen, Josiah, you are looking a might peaked!"

"Yes, Miss Hattie, I believe I've got a touch of the epizootic."

"Well, I've got just the thing. Come over to my garden."

I'm not sure people really talked like that in the olde days of Forgottonia, but folks really did use plants from the wilderness and their gardens to treat many illnesses. In fact, before the days of pharmacies, there was an entire industry built around herbal medicine. Europeans had centuries of experience, and when they came to America, that knowledge was combined with what Native Americans had learned over the millennia.

You first have to imagine what it was like out here on the prairie in the early nineteenth century. Farms were small, with lots of wildflowers and plants growing around the edges. There were stands of old-growth forests that hadn't yet been cleared for farming. That meant there were many places to find herbs, roots, and plants that folks knew had medicinal effects. You just had to know what you were looking for.

That's where the knowledge of herbalists came in. They were folks (often women) who had been taught what to look for and how to use it when they found it. They also grew some of the more common things in their gardens.

What kind of things were they using? Some had familiar names like juniper and golden rod but others had exotic names like High Crampbark and Kidney Liver Leaf. Crampbark was an antispasmodic or nervine while Kidney Liver Leaf was a "demulcent" and a "deobstruent". Those were old time words that had to do with congestion of the lungs.

Herbalists shouldn't be confused with those travelling peddlers who sold patent medicines. They were literally selling snake oil "guaranteed to cure what ails you". The reason for that is the medicines were mostly alcohol so if you took enough, it didn't hurt any more. Herbalists were true medical practitioners. Training had taught them what plants worked for what ailments. If you are skeptical, remember that aspirin was originally derived from the bark of willow trees.

The plants they used had some very colorful names. A lot of them were named after animals like adder's tongue, bear's foot, cranesbill, coltsfoot, horsetail, lion's root, skunk cabbage, turkey corn, and rattlesnake master. They also used lots of roots from plants. Among them are alum root, beth root, cotton root, dragon root, gravel root, pink root, red root, black root, stoneroot, blood root, bitter root, life root, and lion's root. Most of the time, the herbalist would gather the plants and roots and then make a liquid mixture. Sometimes, they would extract the liquid and then distill it. Others were made into "plasters," which were pastes that were slathered onto the area being treated.

There were some plants whose names were just fun to say. Who wouldn't like to get a dose of boneset, lungwort, mugwort, skull cap, or haircap moss? Wouldn't it just make you feel better to take some wahoo?

Some of them sounded vaguely like girls' names-angelica, female fern, damiana, juniper, witch hazel, lobelia and tansy. We need the care of someone dear to us like mothersroot and maidenhair.

Humans have been getting sick since we left the Garden of Eden and we have given some of the diseases names as exotic as the plants used to treat them. If you ever had a touch of dyspepsia, general debility, dropsy, intemperance, or catarrh, you might need an emetic, diaphoretic, sialagogue, demulcent, or emmenagogue.

The medicines were often gathered in the wild but some could be grown in the herbalist's garden. I even have some of them growing in my garden- just common flowers like echinacea, yarrow and potentilla.  Geraniums were used to relieve infant cholera.  Sage was distilled to get a volatile oil for fever. It was so popular that there was an old saying "he that would live for aye must eat sage in May". 

The old timers may not have known exactly what it was that made you better. An old book explained thyme  "...is under the dominion of Venus and under the sign of Aries, and therefore chiefly appropriated to the head". Regardless of the astrological implications, thyme was used for hysteria and giddiness.  Even things that we don't consider medicine were useful. Celery could cure incontinence. Corn silks contained maizenic acid. My dad told of how his mother would make dandelion salads in the early spring. Their leaves are said to have slight narcotic properties. Even those pesky violets that come up with the dandelions could be made into a syrup for coughs and colds.

The most famous herbalist in Forgottonia was "Mother" Mary Ann Bickerdyke from Galesburg. She gained her fame as a Civil War nurse but before that she was herbalist. So, no matter what the nature of your ailment, an herbalist probably had just the thing to cure what ails you (except baldness).