In fact, when you visit the Highlands today, you will still find in many places the remnants of the superstitions of the past. Trees beside sacred wells are adorned with cloth rags, blowing in the wind like Tibetan prayer flags, for that is exactly what they are, prayers for healing, originally offered to the deities of the sacred wells. At other sites you will see silver coins studding a fallen tree in a sacred place, such as the “wishing tree” at the Fairy Glen, on the Black Isle. Silver was traditionally offered to the lunar goddesses, a tradition dating to the pre-patriarchal times in Scotland.
Grannie Bacon’s Women’s Plant
…dauco seeds wrapped in a small bag.
As it turns out, Grannie Bacon learned of these seeds from the Indians, and they are used for birth control. Claire remembers Nayawenne and that she referred to this plant as the “women’s plant.”
In the Highlands, plants with abortive properties were used. In those times, when women were often taken against their will, not to mention the unwanted extra mouths to feed in times of famine, the use of these plants was deemed by some women a necessary skill. In the luxury of our modern society this may seem callous, but in fact “back-street abortion” is still practiced in many developing countries, where female rights are the equivalent of those of these eighteenth-century Highland women. In the eighteenth century, without contraception, it really was a matter of survival. The gift of knowing which herbs could prevent and dispel pregnancy was an empowering one to women healers of the time—and equally one that caused many women healers to perish at the stake during the Burning Times.
The dauco seeds offered to Claire by Grannie Bacon (The Fiery Cross), along with the crude drawing that Claire recognized as distinctive to the Umbelliferae family (think fennel and cumin seeds), is most likely to be the wild carrot, or a relative. The Latin name Daucus carota is an intriguing link to the name the Indians give for the plant, suggesting cross-cultural influence. There are several plants in this family, including parsley seed, that were perhaps used as abortifacients (and, if taken regularly, as contraceptives). However, interestingly, carrot has been used as a female plant in many early traditions.
Women’s Plant—Phallic Interpretations
The Sunday before St. Michael’s Day (Michaelmas) was known in the Highlands as Domhnach Curran, or “Carrot Sunday.” This whole day was dedicated to customs and rituals relating to the symbolic harvesting and offering of carrots as fertility and love emblems. Young girls would spend the day collecting wild carrots and tying them into small bunches with red ribbons, to offer to the menfolk they were besotted with. Even the digging was done ceremoniously; a triangle was made around the plant, and a three-pointed mattock (symbolic of St. Michael’s trident and of the Trinity, most likely referring to an earlier association with the triple aspects of the goddess) was used to dig out the root. Once the carrots were gathered in bunches, women would place them in sacks around a dance hall, where the St. Michael’s Day celebrations would be held, with their personal symbol visible to others. Throughout the night, men would take carrots from a sack and the women would replenish them. When a woman entered to refill her sack, she would say (in Gaelic):
“It is myself that have the carrots, whoever he be that would win them from me. It is myself that have the treasure, whoso the hero could take them from me.”
Basically, this was a flirtatious challenge and announcement that she was on the lookout for a suitor.
Fascinating that the carrot was a symbol of love and fertility for young women, as well as being used to procure a woman’s courses (bring on menstruation) or as an herbal remedy efficient in terminating a pregnancy. Therefore the carrot was very much an herb of women throughout all stages of womanhood to the early Highlanders, as it was to indigenous women of many other cultures.
Caution! While it is known that carrot seed acts as an abortifacient and was historically used as a contraceptive, it is not known at what dose. Carrot seed is a poison at a relatively low dosage, and women experimenting with it in this context have actually lost their life. Many remedies of the past went out of fashion for a reason. It is also a reminder that a single plant can be a food, a medicine, and a poison all at once.
AMERICA’S CAULDRON OF CULTURES
When the Scots arrived in the colonies of America, they brought with them their physicians, their knowledge of Scottish native medicinal plants, their medical knowledge and skill.
Those that were able to survive the long voyage to reach the coastal regions stepped ashore and unpacked their cultural cargo at all levels of society.
Medics, military men, plantation owners, ministers, and manual workers made themselves at home in the New World.
The First World people—the black African slaves and the Europeans—all congregated in the colonies, and although the advance of the knowledge from the natural world appeared publicly to come from the white Western, predominantly male society, there was inevitably an exchange of knowledge among all cultures.
A GARDEN OF THE FUTURE
Alexander Garden (who named the gardenia flower), a famous Scottish physician, botanist, and zoologist, born in Aberdeen and from the Edinburgh medical school, held a reverence for the knowledge of the indigenous people. He believed that the black slaves of the plantation owners knew more of the natural world and the local medicines than they did. He also developed a successful vaccine during the 1760 smallpox outbreak in Charleston, South Carolina, and inoculated over two thousand people. He later wrote an essay on the medicinal properties of a native plant he discovered in South Carolina, pinkroot. He was a perfect example of the melting-pot effect of the colonies: a Scottish physician, head of the Edinburgh physic garden, familiar with native Scottish cures, who in the colonies learned from the black slaves and the local plants and was also a pioneer of modern medicine, during the advent of inoculations.
O TEMPORA! O MORES!
A lesser-known Scottish physician of this time is William Murray, of Dumfries, an acquaintance of Alexander Garden who traveled to Charleston in the 1750s. His brother, John Murray, later followed and was an esteemed military man who built forts with the Cherokee Indians (whom he described as savage inhabitants).
William Murray, the doctor, very much feels as if he could have been a real-life Murray MacLeod, the apothecary of The Fiery Cross. He is a blend of the contemporary medicine of the time with simple herbal cures, mentioned in his letters, and although the innovation of inoculations was imminent, he, like many, continued to use leeches in his clinical practice:
If the loch leeches are lent, all the nursing they require is to keep them in a viol glass with fresh water which must be changed now and then.
—LETTER (1765) FROM A FRIEND ADVISING HOW TO KEEP LEECHES
Through correspondence between the Murray brothers, their mother, cousins, and their friends, we get a sense of how the world “opened up” during this time and the impact that it had on modern medicine.
Europeans were importing (and exporting) seeds and plant specimens and exchanging cures among themselves:
I came here too late in the season to make a proper collection of seeds and plants for him but will in the fall send him a compiled one of all our curious trees and plants.
—A MILITARY FRIEND SENDS A MESSAGE FOR DR. MURRAY, FROM SPAIN
Remember Claire’s joy at finding the contents of Hannah Arnold’s medical chests in An Echo in the Bone?
The herbs were interesting and useful in themselves, being plainly imported: cinchona bark—I must try to send that back to North Carolina for Lizzie, if we ever got off this horrible tub—mandrake, and ginger, things that never grew in the colonies. Having them to hand made me feel suddenly rich.
—AN ECHO IN THE BONE
African black slaves, away from home, were discovering remedies of their own, and later these would also be included in the modern American Pharmacopoeia. Alcohol was being imported from abroad to make medicines, and news was being sent home of new cures and exotic plants:
Would you inform Doctor Murray I have imported from Madeira a piper of the best pale wine which I shall keep during the summer and send home to Carolina in the fall according to his directions.
—A FRIEND IN THE MILITARY COLLECTS MADEIRA WINE FOR THE DOCTOR TO MAKE MEDICINES WITH
Inoculation was advancing as a new way of tackling smallpox epidemics, which allowed Western physicians to rapidly gain wealth and critical acclaim:
…he would now have had an opportunity of enlarging his fortune as the smallpox rages in toun and the doctors are getting money very fast.
—WILLIAM’S BROTHER, JOHN, WRITES FROM CHARLESTON (1760) TO ADVISE HIM TO RETURN TO HIS MEDICAL PRACTICE
Of course, physicians, botanists, and naturalists wrote home with their latest cures and curious finds:
I am pretty positive your lungs are quite sound and that your cough is occasioned only by a weakness of the glands about your throat and in such cases I would advice you to gargle your throat with plum water in the morning and when your cough is troublesome, this I am hopeful will strengthen the laxed parts and in some measure prevent your cough. If it should not answer it can do no harm—only do not swallow it if you can help it. You’ll please let me know its success…I pray for your health and happiness and am, my dear mother, your most affectionate son and humble servant.
—WILLIAM MURRAY, CHARLES TOWN, MAY 22, 1756
It was the influence of doctors like William Murray and Alexander Garden of the Edinburgh medical school that helped the expansion of healthcare in the United States, beginning with the opening of the first hospital in Pennsylvania (1752).
From the opening of the first hospital in America, the world of medicine organized itself, formed societies, invented the stethoscope, isolated chemicals, and developed anesthetics; then finally, in 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman M.D. in America and the first recognized woman on the U.K. register of physicians.
For a while it seemed like the wise women of the past were being honored.
[The correspondence and memoirs of the Murray brothers, John and William, can be found in the Murray of Murraythwaite Estate, Dumfries archives, at the Scottish National Archive (NAS) Centre, Edinburgh.]
WORLD WAR CONFLICTS
Even with the advancement of pharmaceutical science, by the time the Second World War hit in Europe, plants continued to be relied upon as the primary source of medicine. However, there was a problem. Although penicillin had already been discovered, chemists hadn’t found a way of producing enough quantity to meet the demand of the battlefield. By this time, 96 percent of the plants needed for medicines in the U.K. came from abroad. There was also malnutrition creeping in from the wartime rationing. With the war in full fury, in 1941, the British government sent out a plea to women’s organizations all over the country to forage the countryside for medicinal herbs. Nettles were collected for iron, rose hips to make rose-hip syrup for vitamin C, sphagnum moss for dressings on the battlefield, and many other known native medicinal plants.
Interestingly enough, in this same year the government passed a law in the U.K. that would effectively ban the practice of herbal medicine (with the exception of doctors) until the year 1968.
While women with knowledge of herbs were out collecting them in the countryside for their men at war and children, they were also banned from using them therapeutically for the following twenty-seven years.
With herbs now on the back burner, it was a good thing that antibiotics were swiftly made available to the world. From this point on, physicians (and patients) gave a sigh of relief—for a while—as previously life-threatening conditions became manageable.
ANCIENT BIOTICS
Some way or another, however, history repeats itself, and in this rapidly evolving modern world we live in, we are now confronted with the “megabug” bacteria crisis that threatens a world once protected by antibiotics. MRSA and other antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria have become a prime topic for researchers. Ironically, in a search for new cures, the world of science is looking once more to the ancient world of traditional cures for ideas. At Nottingham University, an Anglo-Saxon literature researcher discovered an ancient antibiotic cure in an eye-ointment recipe from the tenth-century Anglo-Saxon herbal, Bald’s Leechbook. This book also lists native Highland remedies, and scientists were intrigued by a remedy that used garlic and another native allium, mixed with ox bile, as a remedy for the eyes.
To their surprise, when the scientists reconstructed this remedy in a laboratory, they found it to be 96 percent effective against MRSA—better than any other agent they had tested.
In an eighteenth-century handwritten herbal notebook recently found gathering dust on a shelf in the library of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons, in Glasgow, Scotland, a very similar remedy using the bile from a hare is listed as a salve for wab of the eye. This looks to suggest that these tenth-century remedies in Bald’s Leechbook remained in use, with variations, for a further eight centuries.
REVISITING THE PAST
It is refreshing to think that the healing potential of plants, which were once discarded as heretical and superstitious, can be rediscovered in a beneficial way through the new eyes of modern science.
Accounts of history have been sitting on a shelf for centuries, silently untranslated, waiting to be picked up and rediscovered through a fresh awareness of the world.
Many of the medical manuscripts of the Beaton lineage of healers in the Gaelic medical tradition await translation to this day. Will the medical researchers of the modern world, at some point, travel back in time like Claire, taking with them their modern drugs and knowledge of medicine to develop their own cures and become our “Druid priests” of the future?
AN OUTLANDISH MATERIA MEDICA
Nine herbs from Claire’s medicine kit:
Willow Bark
Salix alba (Latin); Saileach or Saille (Gaelic).
Parts used: Bark.
Boil the leaves of willow trees in watter till thy be thick as a poltice: and Aply them to the Roines of the back as hot as yow can indure it: and if it be at the time when the willows have no lives take the iner Rins of the bark of the tree and in 4 or 5 times dressing it yow will be heall.
—AN HERBAL APPLICATION FOR A SORE BACK, USING WILLOW, FROM THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY HANDWRITTEN HERBAL NOTEBOOK, ROYAL COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS AND SURGEONS, GLASGOW
By the eighteenth century, the medicinal use of willow bark for pain relief and treatment of fever was widespread in the Western world as well as in the Orient. Its famed analgesic properties caught the attention of chemists in the early nineteenth century, and by the 1820s a yellow, bitter-tasting compound had been isolated and identified as the “active principle” in willow bark.
Traditional use: Fevers, headaches, pain relief, menstrual cramps.
Modern use: Salicylic acid, an active constituent in willow, is the origin of aspirin. The name is a derivative of Salix (the Latin name for “willow”). It is a modern painkiller, known to reduce fevers.
Outlander: Used as a tea for pain relief in Outlander, and later Claire suggests Jamie drink it with sow fennel as a hangover cure in Drums of Autumn.
Pine
Pinus sylvestris scotica (L); Guithas (G)—meaning “juicy,” in reference to the abundance of sap.
Parts used: Leaves, resin, and bark (traditional use only).
There is no tree that looks nobler than it does towering amongst our bens and glens.
—CHARLES FERGUSSON, 1878 (GAELIC SOCIETY)
The Scots have such a strong identity with pine trees that in 2014 the government officially made it their national tree.
Traditional use: Used topically (antiseptic) and also for “agues” (fevers and shivering, possibly viruses). Respiratory infections. Pine tea was probably used to ward off scurvy.
Modern use: Known as a powerful antiseptic and expectorant, mainly used as a respiratory herb and in antiseptic products. The needles are a good source of vitami
n C.
Outlander: Although no reference is made to the use of it medicinally, the fragrant tones of pine permeate the series, from the banks of Lallybroch to Fraser’s Ridge and the plantations. Without a doubt its medicinal properties would have been known to Claire and others, and it most certainly would have been used as a beverage or medicine.
Comfrey (Boneset)
Symphytum officinale (L); Meacan dubh (G)—meaning “many black roots,” referring to the abundance of “dirty” knobbly roots.
Parts used: Leaves and roots.
Traditional use: Comfrey as a plaister was applied to broken bones. The roots are highly mucilaginous; however, when applied on thin muslin to the affected part, the pulverized root would set—restricting movement and acting like a modern plaster cast. We now know that comfrey contains a special kind of alkaloid that is absorbed through the skin and promotes the production of osteoclasts, which aid in bone healing. The mucilage was also said to heal ulcers internally.
Modern use: Comfrey is used with caution now, because we know that the alkaloids it contains can be stored in the liver and can accumulate, causing harmful effects. However, the leaf, which contains less alkaloids, is still used by herbalists in treating connective-tissue complaints. The young leaves are a source of B12 and were once part of the staple diet. (The young leaves contain less alkaloids.)
The Companion to the Fiery Cross, a Breath of Snow and Ashes, an Echo in the Bone, and Written in My Own Heart's Blood Page 88