It turns out people have feelings about questioning authority. Where’s my respect for the venerable professors? Let me tell you that my respect is rightfully directed toward the women who authored these manuscripts. In this post, I am going to use the academic handling of Lady Borlase’s receipt book as an example of the erasure of women’s knowledge and why it’s our job to push back against shoddy scholarship.
The Borlase receipt book has been digitized and transcribed in an online collection at the University of Iowa known as Szathmary Culinary Manuscripts and Cookbooks. The name of the collection does not even hint at the fact that there are medical receipts in many of their books. A person only familiar with the modern context of the word “cookbook” would not have the slightest clue that they could find this information in that collection.
As a further insult, the manuscript is housed under the title ROBERT GODFREY RECEIPTS, 1665-1799. Robert Godfrey was Lady Borlase’s scribe. It was common during that era for women of the upper class to hire someone to take dictation. It’s was just a weird quirk of education back then that for some reason women were taught to read well but only write passably.
Regardless of who did the writing, the receipts were those she collected and were used by her staff and possibly family members. Why is the university giving credit for the intellectual property of the woman to her secretary? Can you imagine the uproar that I could create by going back and naming documents written by men after their secretaries?
This particular receipt book has also been published with commentary by David Schoonover which is honestly not worth reading. Schoonover’s commentary is condescending, and in some cases just wrong. He clearly illustrates a lack of knowledge of the history of chemistry when he states his derisive opinions about the medical remedies recorded in the manuscript. Very little he wrote about early modern medicine, especially the legal status and scope of practice of the apothecary, leads me to believe that he had any substantial knowledge of the early modern healthcare system at all.
That’s the sort of thing that those of us who want to treat our lady experimenters respectfully do. We ask questions about why something might have been useful, we don’t just roll our eyes and call it laughable.
For those few of you who might find yourself mired in the constrictions of mainstream academia, I am sure you are shaking your head at me just like my second reader did and saying “This is how it is done.” My reply is that it does not have to be.
If you see something that seems strange to you, investigate the “why” behind its use. Many of my students are surprised when they find out that bird dung contains crude forms of ammonia and wound care preparations that included this odd ingredient were the predecessor of the ammoniated plasters used in health care well into the 19th century.
Synthesized ammonia is as ubiquitous in medicine today as crude forms of it were in the past. Small amounts serve as an alkalizing agent to adjust the pH of pharmaceutical preparations. It is an excipient in some antibiotics, cephalexin, doxycycline, fluoxetine, and omeprazole just to name a few. Ammonium chloride is included in some OTC cough medicines as an expectorant.[1]
Ammonia also has antiseptic properties when applied topically. Ammonium bituminosulfonate which is sold under the brand name Ichthyol is still used by some physicians to draw boils to a head more quickly so they can be lanced and drained. Weak ammonia solution is also used as a counterirritant in topical preparations like Afterbite™ for insect stings and bites.[2]
A few things are just weird, but for the most part, but if you do a little research you will find that there was a little reason behind the odd practices. That’s what makes this sort of study so much fun!
[1] Sheskey, Paul, Cook, Walter, and Cable, Collin, eds. Handbook of Pharmaceutical Excipients. 8th ed. London, UK: Pharmaceutical Press and American Pharmaceutical Association, 2017. 68-69
[2] Ibid.
Domestic Medicine 