It’s 2022…You do not need to purge.

Often when people are writing about history, they are looking for the sensational and weird to use as clickbait, but if you look at a wide range of publications, there is a lot of common sense too. The truth is that the early modern healthcare culture focused far more on staying well to prevent the need for physick. You couldn’t even open a book about taking care of your eyes without being told that the preservation of eyesight “doth consist partly in good order of diet.” When was the last time your optometrist told you what to eat?

I approve of this because one of my core beliefs is that preventative healthcare should be focused on what we can give to our bodies, not what we can take away. As an herbal clinician, I take a three-legged-stool approach to health. One of the key aspects of my approach is focusing on building rich, oxygenated blood and strong healthy tissues. I genuinely believe that integrating herbal preparations into your daily regimen can contribute to this in significant ways. During my time as a clinician, I have seen people change their lives.

There is a lot of wisdom to be found in these old receipts, but I also need to point out that there is a lot of nonsense in them also. The goal of my educational experience was to build a sound foundational knowledge of modern bioscience to help me discern between those two things.

They call that bioprospecting and as you can imagine I am fairly good at it. My research projects have taught me two things.

1. Just because something worked does not mean it worked for the reason practitioners of the past thought it did. Remedies remained relatively stable for thousands of years while theory changed a great dea.
2. Some things did not work or were completely unnecessary.

For example, Greek physicians seemed to think inducing vomiting (emetics) and diarrhea (purgatives) along with letting blood were part of the routine maintenance of the body that kept one well. Fasting and other interventions were thought to balance the body when they thought there was an overabundance of one humor or another which as we have established is early modern pseudoscience.

Unfortunately, it took a long time for emetics and purgatives to be phased out of medical practice. This thinking dominated medicine for a milennia. Dutiful Victorian mothers still lined their children up for weekly doses of Brimstone and Treacle on the advice of their doctors who believed everyone was full of “thicke grosse humors” that needed to be purged.

Recommending cleanses and purging emulates some of the worst aspects of professional medicine of the past. It’s always quite annoying to me that the mid-20th century marketing crew brought this trend back.

Constipation is a thing though. So many things can throw our GI system out of order. The early modern answer to constipation was emollients. Today we see the word emollient and we think that almost immediately of skincare, but then it pertained more to “loosening” herbs, which were agents that created moisture and kept you evacuating regularly.

Culpeper, despite his many good qualities was still a humoral practioner. Culpeper recommended mallows/hollyhock, violets, beets, pellitory of the wall, and garden mercury as the five emollient herbs. Some sources list brank-ursine (Acanthus mollis) instead of beets.¹

Garden mercury and brank-ursine are best left in history books. Mercurialis annua contains enough mercury that you can distill it from the plant. I also don’t work with Acanthus spp. just due to mixed reports of toxicity.

Our friend, the eye specialist assured us that strong medicines that agitate the humors are not good to be used frequently and steered people away from the harsher remedies. He recommended broths made of gentle emollients like mallows, violet leaves, groundsel, raisins, Damaske prunes, and currants².

I can absolutely get on board with the mallows, violets, and beets for this purpose. The plants contain mucilages and fiber. One class of constituent you will find I mention a lot is pectic polysaccharides and complex pectins³. Pectin, found in apples, lemons, and bramble berries, is a beneficial fiber that also has antioxidant capacities. There is decent support from clinical trials⁴ that pectin can be helpful for GI complaints including normalizing stools.

The message really hasn’t changed all that much in terms of taking proactive measures to stay regular.

1. Dietary Fiber: A diet rich in soluble and insoluble fibers supports regular bowel movements by increasing stool bulk and improving peristalsis. This accounts for the popularity of gruels and porridge.
2. Hydration: Adequate water intake prevents stool from becoming hard and difficult to pass.
3. Take a Daily Constitutional: This phrase originally meant to go for a walk, however in the UK it might also refer to your daily bowel movement. This is because, reegular exercise stimulates intestinal motility, which aids elimination.
4. Stress Management: Techniques such as mindfulness, yoga, and deep-breathing exercises can reduce sympathetic nervous system dominance, promoting healthy elimination.

My doctor joked with me a few years ago that it was time for me to start eating prunes. I do not like the texture of prunes, so I worked up the following decoction.

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