Web of Healing

Commentary on Primary Source

For students and teachers, this section provides an example of a primary source document. It is also meant to serve as an example for how historians can make use of these sources. In general, this page offers a glimpse into the Web of Healing through local archival materials.

Commentary on William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine

“I know it will be said, that diffusing medical knowledge among the people might induce them to tamper with medicine, and to trust to their own skill instead of calling a physician.  The reverse of this however is true.  Persons who have most knowledge in these matters, are commonly most ready both to ask and to follow advice, when it is necessary.  The ignorant are always most apt to tamper with Medicine, and have the least confidence in physicians.  Instances of this are daily to be met with among the ignorant peasants, who, while they absolutely refuse to take a medicine which has been prescribed by a physician, will swallow with greediness any thing that is recommended to them by their credulous neighbors.  Where men will act even without knowledge, it is certainly more rational to afford them all the light we can, than to leave them entirely in the dark.” (Buchan, xxiii-xxiv)

This excerpt comes from William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine, a home-remedy guide which was widely circulated in both England and America during the 18th and 19th centuries.  William Buchan was an 18th-century physician.  The first edition of his book was published in Edinburgh in 1769, and went through many more editions.  It was reprinted in America as early as 1772, and maintained prominence in Americans’ lives well into the 19th century.  We did not get to see the first edition of Buchan’s text, but we do know for certain that this particular passage appeared in print by the second edition, published in 1785, and remained in the exact same wording in the 13th edition, published in Philadelphia in 1793.  While Buchan’s text was only one of the many domestic medicine manuals written for a general audience in the 18th century, his book is of particular interest because of his spirited introductory chapter in which he provides a lengthy explanation for the usefulness and necessity of his work.  The above excerpt comes from this introductory section.

During the first two and a half centuries of America’s existence (first as the British colonies, and later as an independent nation), the majority of people looked to their own homes for healing and treatment from illness.  Women – in their roles as wives, sisters, daughters, aunts, grandmothers, and neighbors – were the primary care givers for their friends and family when illness struck.  Treatments for specific ailments ranging from broken bones to fevers would have consisted of simple concoctions, tonics, ointments, and aliments made from the contents of the average backyard garden (backyard gardens in the 18th century, however, were far more complex and varied than they are today and many of the “common” ingredients referred to in recipe books and medical manuals from the era would seem exotic to us today).  Women learned about these remedies from friends, neighbors, and relatives, but they also might have picked up a medicinal recipe from their local physician, midwife, or apothecary.  Even when a wife or mother might have deemed an illness beyond her expertise and would call in an educated physician, the doctor’s authority was limited.  Although women healers would have rarely performed bloodletting on a patient, many of their remedies looked quite similar to those prescribed by a doctor.  Even by the end of the 18th century, elite physicians had few effective therapies to offer sick patients that could procure a definite cure. The physician’s limited abilities to actually heal illness left them in a position from which they could merely make suggestions and provide advice.

These traditional, female-centered bodies of health knowledge eventually fell out of prominence as the profession we recognize today as modern medicine gained authority and jurisdiction over health-related practices.  This change did not happen overnight, however, and William Buchan’s Domestic Medicine provides us with a wonderful glimpse into the changes that were taking shape in the world of healing at the end of the 18th century.  In the above excerpt, Buchan offers us his reasoning for why domestic medicine manuals, such as his own, are so important and necessary.  He writes, “the ignorant are always most apt to tamper with Medicine, and have the least confidence in physicians.”  This particular sentence exemplifies a highly complex line of reasoning, which Buchan was one of the first doctors to advocate.  His argument, that “the ignorant” should be educated in the ways and language of physicians, hinged on his belief that most people distrusted the advice of doctors because they were unfamiliar with his remedies and practices.  If a patient’s disregard for the physician’s therapies stemmed from a difference between how the patient and doctor thought about healing, then, reasoned Buchan, such a disagreement could be resolved simply by familiarizing the patient with the doctor’s methods and rhetoric.

Not only did Buchan believe that his domestic medicine manual would help make patients more compliant and willing to accept the advice of doctors, but his writing also tells us that he believed he was helping to ensure the success of doctors as a profession by eliminating competition from “credulous neighbors.” Given the state of healing at the time Buchan was writing his book, we can surmise that these “credulous neighbors” to whom Buchan refers were probably women, who as a group had been dispensing cures to their friends and family for hundreds of years.  For Buchan and many other physicians during this time, however, the meddling of women into the affairs of doctors was becoming unwelcome.  Doctors wanted their advice to be taken seriously and not tossed lightly aside for the more attractive cure of a friend or relative. 

Buchan’s Domestic Medicine manual, and others like it, served the dual role of both informer and usurper.  The manual informed its readers about how to make and dispense cures for simple infections and ailments, but in doing so it was also attempting to replace the traditional ways of transferring health knowledge between women with that of the contemporarily familiar physician-mediated systems of knowledge.  In 18th-century America, women took on an “auxiliary role.” (Murphy, xv)  Women traded some of their authority over healing in their households for the opportunity to benefit from the learned advice of a physician.  This interactive, skeptical relationship between women and physicians characterized much of the healing practiced in America at the end of the 18th century.