April 2016 - Medicines in Tudor Times
Members of the Horndean & District U3A met for their regular monthly meeting on Friday 1st April at Merchistoun Hall. They were entertained by a talk by Sally Murdoch about “Medicines in Tudor Times”. Sally introduced six “medical practitioners” from those days:
The Physician would have been to university for seven years, learning about diseases and medicines. They would also have studied astrology!
The Surgeon would have been trained for support in the battlefield, not a university course. He also cut hair and pulled teeth!
The Apothecary would also have university training for seven years, learning about how to make the medicines prescribed by the physician.
The Midwife would have learned everything about childbirth, including baptism!
The Herbwife would have been apprenticed to another, “qualified” herbwife.
The Monks were the scientists of the day, investigating and testing new potential cures. They also hosted the hospitals.
The members heard about medical practices in Tudor times, some of which are horrendous by today’s standards and others seem plain daft. For example, placing a piece of angelica plant under the soles of the feet and walking on it was believed to prevent the plague! Bloodletting was rife – to free bad humours; for the very young and the elderly this was done by leeches. Physicians would consult the patient’s star chart to elicit help in the diagnosis – the star sign under which one was born was believed to indicate the most likely part of the body to be affected. Trepanning was also common. This involved drilling into the patient’s skull – without anaesthetic! – again to free the bad humours, and was often fatal. Physicians had to be licensed. At the end of the consultation, the physician would write a prescription to be taken to the apothecary.
Surgeons, being trained to support armies on the battlefield, knew how to staunch bleeding, fix broken bones and perform amputations – and all in the mud or filth of the ground. Sterilisation of equipment was unknown and, again, there was no anaesthetic. But one of the techniques used to help bones to mend is now being used in some areas today so not everything was as backward as we now believe. Making a paste of pounded comfrey root and spreading it round the injured bone, the surgeon would have helped the process in two ways – the paste would set and form an early type of plaster of Paris to hold the bone still while it reset itself. Very few villages had their own surgeon, especially in times of war, so they often had to wait for the regular visit – every month or two. Surgeons were, though, well thought of by the king. Henry VIII inaugurated the Royal College of Surgeons in 1512. They had to be licensed.
The apothecary usually had a shop, equipped with various solid, liquid and natural ingredients from which to make up the pills or potions as prescribed by the physician. Many of these ingredients would be recognisable by time-travellers from today. Apothecaries had to make money, and one of the ways they did so was to clothe pills in fine gold leaf when supporting the richer members of society. If it was gold-covered it was bound to be more effective, and was thus charged accordingly. It is also possible that the placebo came into being at this time, though the word was not known then. Many country apothecaries had their own herb garden but those in big towns were forced into buying plant ingredients from elsewhere. Spices were getting more common too – though still expensive – with trade from the near and far east. Cloves were very useful in the medicinal sphere but they were by no means unique. Apothecaries need a licence to practise.
Midwives were strictly controlled, even 400 years ago. They had a list of requirements to fulfil – remembering that death in baby or in childhood was very common. Midwives had to commit to doing all in their power to preserve life. An additional requirement, for those unavoidable situations when a child was not expected to live longer than a day or two, was that the midwife was qualified to baptise the infant and to advise the local clergy accordingly. Through their ‘contract’, midwives were strictly controlled and licensed.
Each village was likely to have had a herbwife, someone who was familiar with all things herbal for both medicinal and culinary use. Typically they would have a larger plot for growing the plants – and therefore more likely to be on the edge of the village. These women – they seem always to have been female because the men would have been in the fields earning their money – would have been involved in diagnosis and treatment of illness and disease because very few small settlements had their own physician, and were the origin of many remedies still favoured by herbalists today.
Monks, especially before the Dissolution of the Monasteries, involved themselves in growing plants both for their own consumption and for experimentation in their use as remedies. Such knowledge would have been shared through normal conversation – perhaps some herbwives or pharmacists used the monasteries as the source of their ingredients – and so progress in the field continued. The monasteries also provided the only hospital facilities of the age. Monks saw their calling as tending to the poor and the ill; hence we have leper hospitals and, still today, Christ’s Hospital.
So, in Tudor times, there were recognisable professions of today; the doctor, the (barber) surgeon, the pharmacist, the midwife and the nursing staff. Perhaps the only one of these roles not directly relative to today is the herbwife. In earlier times they might have been thought of as “White Witches” though today’s herbalists are perhaps their closest relations. Sally finished by demonstrating how some of these Tudor remedies were prepared – she still uses some of them herself – and provided a hand-out sheet of many medicinal plants. For Health and Safety reasons these have not been included here.
Diane Stoner, Speaker Co-ordinator.