The Outlandish Companion

by Diana Gabaldon

  Marigolds are also recommended as gopher repellants, under the theory that gophers won’t eat them. However, I can state categorically that gophers will too eat marigolds. Of course, I seemed to have unusually stalwart gophers; they even ate the okra plants (no, I don’t eat okra. My father-in-law eats okra). Granted, they ate the okra last, but they did eat it.

  Beyond the culinary and the aromatic, I also grow things now and then for the sake of novelty or curiosity. (I did try growing foxglove once, but it doesn’t do at all well in the desert where I live. The birdhouse gourd vine did much better.) And—as the result of having once taught a class called “The Natural History of Arizona,” I do have a reasonable idea of which desert plants one should definitely not think of squeezing for water, if marooned in an arid wasteland. (Never, ever ingest a desert plant that doesn’t have thorns. Desert plants are a stationary source of water in a dry habitat, and thus in constant danger from bugs, animals, etc. They all protect themselves in one way or another— thorns, spines, thick, waxy skins. If you see a plant that doesn’t seem to be using any of these overt forms of defense, the betting is good that it’s using something else—poisonous alkaloids.)

  But no, I’m not by any means a professional botanist or herbalist. In fact, the sum total of my academic credentials is the six class-hours of botany required to get a B.S. degree in zoology at Northern Arizona University. I can tell a monocot from a dicot, diagram the cross-section of a composite flower, and tell the difference between the basidiomycetes and the ascomycetes (those are different kinds of fungi, in case you were wondering), but what with one thing and another, I’ve never found any really graceful way to work these bits of information into a fictional scene.

  Of Gophers and Gardens

  THE ONLY MEANS I found of peaceful coexistence with the gophers was bribery. If I made a peanut-butter-and-molasses sandwich (on wholewheat bread; God forbid the gophers should suffer from a lack of dietary fiber) every night, and went and hurled this into the middle of the garden, my plants remained largely untouched. If If I forgot the nightly sandwich… Whoops! There goes another pelargonium.

  Fortunately, my husband (dear man) built me a gopherproof garden enclosure as a birthday present a few years ago, so the gophers have been reduced to gnawing on the plastic fittings of the irrigation system for their dietary fiber. Now all I have to worry about is dogs with a lust for ripe tomatoes, ants with a passion for my ruby-pearl grapes, and snakes looking for a shady spot to sleep.

  However, the furthest I would go in using herbs for medical treatment is to rub crushed lavender on my daughter’s temples for a headache, or to pass out my Altoids peppermint tablets to fellow travelers suffering from motion sickness (oil of peppermint relaxes the smooth muscle of the stomach and intestine, relieving indigestion and flatulence. One person to whom I told this said, “I could have lived without knowing that”). It might not help, but it isn’t going to hurt anybody.

  What I do for the botanical details in my books is what I do for the historical ones—I do research. When I first began to write about Claire Beauchamp Randall Fraser, I thought quite a bit about what skills a time-traveler should ideally have, and concluded that basic medical knowledge might be one of the better things to be well-versed in. This was also a good choice, in purely fictional terms, because it gave her an excellent excuse for being where all the interesting things (like fights, hunts, wars, and epidemics) were going on.

  It didn’t take much thought or research to realize that in the eighteenth century, prior to the advent of antibiotics and anesthesia, the only effective methods of medical treatment were likely to be herbal.

  Now, as I say, I have no particular botanical background myself. So, I began looking for information on the use of herbs, whether for domestic purposes like cooking and bug repelling, or for more esoteric medical usage. Luckily, such information was not at all difficult to come by—and in fact, herbal guides and collections have become much more popular in the ten years or so since I began writing Outlander; any general bookstore is likely to have several available.

  I should point out that a good many of the herbal treatments described in these books are also historical; that is, some uses of herbs have been around for hundreds (and in some cases, likely thousands) of years. The ones that have been around for a long time are probably the ones that worked, but there’s no telling for sure. When I describe herbal treatments in the books, I am always using herbs and preparation techniques that were actually known to have been available at that time, in that place, and for the purpose for which they’re described. This doesn’t mean they were necessarily effective—but they may have been.

  The herbal guides and sources that I have on my shelf currently are all listed in the “Bibliography” section of this book, in a section to themselves, for the convenience of readers with a particular interest in botanical medicine. (I acquired these books over a period of several years, so I didn’t necessarily have all of them available to me during the writing of my novels.)

  One of the first herbals I acquired was The New Age Herbal, which was very helpful indeed, as it included not only general descriptions of various popular herbs and their current uses, but also photographs of the plants, roots, seeds, flowers, etc.

  Fairly soon thereafter, I found a copy (a reprint, I hasten to add) of Nicholas Culpeper’s Complete Herbal, originally published in 1647. This book is also profusely illustrated (with small color drawings), but its chief value to a historical novelist is that it notes the uses to which herbs were put during historical times.

  Besides providing picturesque details of ailments and treatments, it gives one some notion of the prevailing theories of medicine, and the light in which people saw illness and bodily function. Culpeper’s is one of a particular class of book that is particularly useful for historical fiction background, regardless of whether the herbs in question are actually effective. Books of folklore, folk medicine (American Folk Medicine), and ethnic medicine (Indian Herbology of North America) fall into this category; they may be only picturesque for someone interested in practical applications, but they’re invaluable to a writer with an interest in bygone ways.

  One other small consideration that affects writers of historical fiction is that plants found in a particular geographical location today might not always have grown there. Of course, one can always manage to acquire anything that’s really necessary for the plot, via a handy merchant, an Oriental traveler, or a peripatetic naturalist—but it’s a good idea to determine whether that’s really necessary.

  The eighteenth century was a time of considerable global exploration and growth in international commerce; consequently, a good many European plants were imported to the Americas—and vice versa—during this time. Still, most such exotic imports would have been limited to apothecary shops in large cities, or to the ornamental gardens kept by many wealthy (and not-so-wealthy) people with an interest in botany. In other words, a character could not reasonably walk into the wild-woods of North Carolina in the mid-eighteenth century and pick horse chestnuts, though they might reasonably do so in a coastal town, where this particular English tree had been planted by a homesick emigrant.

  COMFREY

  Formerly country people cultivated Comfrey in their gardens for its virtue in wound healing, and the many local names of the plant testify to its long reputation as a vulnerary herb—in the Middle Ages it was a famous remedy for broken bones.

  Grieve (A Modern Herbal)

  One drawback to herbal guides is that while some do note that such-and-such a plant is an import from say, Asia or Europe, many don’t—and they rarely tell you when a plant was imported. There are three things that can help with the problem of geographical plausibility: a) read widely—after a time, you become familiar with where and when the more common plants came into use; b) compare guides with a geographical basis (The Hamlyn Guide to Edible and Medicinal Plants of Britain and Northern Europe vs. A Handbook of Native American Herbs vs. Peterson F
ield Guide to Medicinal Plants); and c) when in doubt, ask an expert.

  I was extremely fortunate, myself, in having as a friend Robert Lee Riffle, an experienced botanist with a good reference library. An excellent literary critic as well as a botanist (and an accomplished author himself—The Tropical Look: An Encyclopedia of Dramatic Landscape Plants, Bob was invaluable in helping me find out when and where things grow, and what they look like while doing so. It’s a great comfort to a novelist to have a reliable source to whom one can say, “I need a big green bush that grows in the Caribbean and was there during the eighteenth century. It needs to be big enough to hide behind, and it would be nice if you know what it smells like in the rain.”

  Naturally, not everyone is lucky enough to have a personal botanist on call. However, there are electronic sources of such information: the Garden Forum on CompuServe (also the California and Florida Forums), and similar special-interest areas on America Online. Staffed and patronized by very knowledgeable and helpful people, online reference is one of the best and easiest ways to locate information on specific plants or on the botany of a particular region.

  Microbotanicals: Penicillin and other Antibiotics

  I should mention a particular application of botanical medicine—penicillin. The advent of antibiotics was the third great revolution in modern medicine— anesthesia being the first, a general acceptance of the Germ Theory (with the consequent practice of asepsis) being the second. The discovery of penicillin (and other antibiotics) was in fact an outgrowth of research into disease-causing organisms—bacterial pathogens.

  I don’t imagine there are many people who don’t know the basic story: Sir Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin by accident, as the result of poor housekeeping (let’s hear it for creative mess!). That is, he noticed that a bacterial culture he was growing had been contaminated— and that the contaminant, whatever it was, had secreted a substance that had killed the bacterial culture around it.

  What many people don’t realize is that Sir Alexander did not immediately pick up a hypodermic and start saving lives right and left. While the original discovery was made in 1929, penicillin didn’t become available for general medical use until 1947. This was not because the original discovery was slighted or ignored; it was because it took medical researchers that long to find methods of purifying and stabilizing the product. Prior to that time, penicillin was simply not very useful in a medical sense because it was impossible to tell the strength of a particular batch, to know what dosage might be effective, or to rely on the medicine maintaining its effectiveness for any set period of time.

  I occasionally get letters inquiring why Claire is not slapping moldy bread on wounds throughout the books, since surely she knows about penicillin? Well, actually, she does—which is why she isn’t slapping moldy bread on people.

  What she knows is that a) while there are quite a number of different molds in the genus Penicillium, this is far from being the only kind of mold that grows on bread; and b) there’s no telling whether a particular piece of moldy bread contains any active penicillin (which is not the mold itself, by the way, but rather a substance secreted by the mold); and c) a piece of moldy bread is, in all likelihood, harboring all kinds of other bacterial and chemical contaminants, which it is quite possibly not a good idea to go stuffing into an open wound. Besides… rather difficult, I should think, to arrange always to have moldy bread on hand, just in case someone should cut themselves? (Readers don’t think of these things; writers have to.)

  CHICKEN AND MUSHROOMS in

  Orange Sauce with Fresh Marjoram * 1 chicken breast per person (diced) 4—5 small mushrooms per person ** several spears of asparagus (optional) orange juice

  chicken broth or bouillon

  onion

  garlic

  marjoram

  flour

  salt

  pepper

  Use a deep cast-iron pan, ideally. Mince onion and garlic (I like lots; half an onion and a head of garlic for four breasts), and saute with marjoram in a little butter or olive oil. If using asparagus, break into one-inch pieces and saute with onion and garlic. Add sliced mushrooms and saute till tender.

  Add diced chicken, stirring frequently till chicken appears cooked through. Sprinkle flour (about two tablespoons) lightly over chicken and stir in. Add enough orange juice to cover the chicken. Add about half a cup of chicken broth or bouillon (for four breasts). Let simmer until sauce is desired thickness, adjusting with additional orange juice or broth. Salt and pepper to taste (if you use bouillon, you won’t need much salt).

  You can serve this on almost anything (rice, kasha, lentils, etc.), but I prefer it on egg noodles, topped with a lot of nice grated Romano cheese.

  *Dried marjoram is perfectly all right; I just happen to be able to grow marjoram most of the year here. Quantities? I don’t know; how much do you like marjoram? I generally use half a handful of fresh marjoram per four breasts—that would equal roughly a tablespoon of the dried herb. **If you’re using the normal kind of white button mushrooms. I like all kinds of edible fungi, and normally include sliced portobello mushrooms and a few porcinis or shiitakes. If you don’t like mushrooms at all, leave ’em out.

  Still, since Claire definitely appreciates the role of antibiotics in modern medicine, I rather think that she may make a serious effort to obtain some workable form of penicillin, now that she has a stable home base and (for the time being, at least) is not running around the country pursued by English soldiers and irate clansmen.

  I think that some readers are misled by historical fiction, in which herbal remedies are presented as essentially being simply old-fashioned equivalents of modern drugs. Now, in a way, this is quite true; effective herbs (those containing active chemicals that can affect human or bacterial physiology) actually are drugs, and modern pharmacology has evolved from them: digitalis is derived from foxglove, diosgenins from wild yams are the basis for the steroid hormones in modern medicines from oral contraceptive to asthma medications, and plant-derived substances from oil of peppermint to ipecac are found in a great many formulations.

  PENNYROYAL

  “If boiled and drank, it provokes women’s courses, and expels the dead child and afterbirth, and stays the disposition to vomit, if taken in water and vinegar mingled together.”

  Culpeper (Culpeper’s Complete Herbal)

  However, the important words here are “derived from.” The fact that you can— with the assistance of a rather large research laboratory and several years’ work—eventually produce an oral contraceptive by means of processing chemicals found in wild yams does not necessarily mean that a fictional character could prevent pregnancy by eating wild yams. Au contraire.

  So, while some herbal remedies did (and do) work, the overall effects of these were much less powerful and predictable than those of modern drugs. As Claire herself notes, you might use mashed garlic if you didn’t have anything better, but given the choice, one would always opt for iodine.

  One has to allow for the warped purposes of the novelist, though. If it is fictionally desirable for a sick person to recover—and it usually is; it slows down a story quite a bit, if you kill all the characters—then the herbal treatments applied will generally work, even if the real-life effectiveness of such a treatment is generally not nearly so spectacular.

  PENICILLIN ONLINE A WRITER’S THREAD

  know I’ve frequently mentioned my interactions online in the process of writing the Outlander novels. Some readers will be familiar with this sort of faceless conversation, but others will have little idea how this fascinating process works. I thought it might be interesting to provide a brief glimpse of one such interaction, both as illustration of the process, and perhaps as a bit of insight into how this sort of “research” contributes to the writing of a book.

  There are all kinds of online venues these days, of course, ranging from news-groups and independent Web sites to the immensity of America Online. While I do now and then visit v
arious such venues (there are five or six groups on AOL alone devoted to discussion of the Outlander novels), most of my online time is spent on CompuServe, among the forums of the Readers and Writers Ink Group.

  There are several forums in this group: the Writers Forum, the Literary Forum, the Authors Forum, the Romance Forum, the Erotica Forum, the Poetry Forum, and the Book Preview Forum (and by the time this book appears in print, there may well be more). In The Beginning, there was simply the Literary Forum; as membership increased and online traffic became heavier, though, several new forums evolved from this, offering a broader range and more room for specialized interests among readers and writers.

  My own usual electronic hangout is the Writers Forum, where I am a “section leader”1 in a section called “Research and the Craft of Writing.” This section deals with— surprise!—questions of research “Was peppermint candy available in New York in 1794?” “How do you render someone unconscious quickly, without leaving marks?”), and craft “How many points of view can you use in a novel?” “Should a writer begin with short stories before tackling a novel?”). Conversations are wide-ranging and always interesting, and I now and then take advantage of the forum’s members myself, for expert advice on research questions.

  Sometimes, I simply ask a straightforward question “What does black powder smell like?”); occasionally, I’ll post a brief excerpt that I’m working on, to see whether some technical point “comes across” adequately in the context of the story, when read by someone with an expertise in medicine or whatever.

  The following section shows part of a “thread,” or conversation, based on one of these excerpts. When a question is asked or a message posted in any of the CompuServe Forums, it may be addressed to a specific person, or to “All,” but anyone who reads it is more than welcome to respond.2 When I occasionally post an excerpt like this, there’s no telling who may read it, or what they may have to say about it. The original message(s) and the responses to it are collectively called a “thread.”