Primitive Physick - John Wesley

Christian theologian and cleric, John Wesley (1703-1791), who is credited with founding the Methodist denomination of Christianity, and due to whose teachings the Methodists were leading activists in the social issues of their day such as prison reform and abolitionism, is not necessarily someone we would expect to write a book detailing treatments for all sorts of medical ailments. But this is what he did in a relatively little-known work of his entitled Primitive Physick; Or An Easy And Natural Method of Curing Most Diseases. 

It is notable, however, that during his lifetime Wesley was considered a quack, both spiritually and medically (Madden, 2007). He led an itinerant lifestyle in order to preach as he never had his own church, and it is thought that the prevalence of disease as well as the prevalence and tendency of quacks who combined their treatments with theology were among the reasons behind writing this book.
 

According to Wesley, the word 'primitive' was akin to 'original' or 'early', and 'physic' was a general term for health care, especially “how to live in accordance with nature by proper diet and exercise, both to restore health and to retain it,” (Maddox, 2007). Taken together, Primitive Physick was a book that would be classed as holistic or alternative medicine today.

In Ingram's Patterns Of Madness In The Eighteenth Century: A Reader, it is noted that Wesley saw disease as a consequence of the Fall and thus regarded mankind as primarily responsible for its own sufferings. Wesley says as much in his preface:

"When man came first out of the hands of the Great Creator, clothed in body, as well as in soul, with immortality and incorruption, there was no place for physic, or the art of healing. As he knew no sin, he knew no pain, no sickness, weakness, or bodily disorder ... But since man rebelled against the Sovereign of heaven and earth, how entirely is the scene changed! ... The seeds of wickedness and pain, of sickness and death, are now lodged in our inmost substance; whence a thousand disorders continually spring, even without the aid of external violence."

Wesley covered the common illnesses of his day in alphabetical order; mental illnesses, curiously, are not distinguished from physical ailments, as in Wesley's view both are derived from man's first disobedience. They are thus stigmatised no more than other illnesses. 

What follows are Wesley's interesting and amusing remedies for various types of psychological conditions, especially the mania associated with rabies:

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44. An Hysteric Cholic.

164. Mrs. Watts, by using the cold bath two and twenty times in a month, was entirely cured of an hysteric cholic, fits, and convulsive motions, continual sweatings and vomiting, wandering pains in her limbs and head, with total loss of appetite.

165. In the fit, half a pint of water with a little wheat-flour in it, and a spoonful of vinegar.

166. Or of warm lemonade: tried.

167. Or, take 20, 30, or 40 drops of balsam of peru on fine sugar: if need be, take this twice or thrice a day:

168. Or, in extremity, boil three ounces of Burdock-seed in water, which give as a clyster:
169. Or, twenty drops of laudanum, in any proper clyster, which gives instant ease. 

45. A Nervous Cholic.

170. Use the cold-bath daily for three or four weeks.

171. Or, take quicksilver and acqua sulphurata daily for a month.

136. Hypochondriac and Hysteric Disorders.

426. Use cold bathing:

427. Or, take an ounce of quicksilver every morning, and ten drops of Elixir of Vitriol in the afternoon, in a glass of cold water.

151. Lunacy.

468. Give a decoction of agrimony four times a day:
469. Or, rub the head several times a day with vinegar, in which ground-ivy leaves have been infused:
470. Or, daily take an ounce of distilled vinegar:
471. Or, boil juice of ground-ivy with sweet oil and white wine into an ointment. Shave the head, anoint it therewith, and chafe it every other day for three weeks. Bruise also the leaves and bind them on the head, and give three spoonfuls of the juice warm every morning.
472. Or, be elecrified: tried.

152. Raging Madness.

473. Apply to the head, cloths dipt in cold water:
474. Or, set the patient with his head under a great water-fall, as long as his strength will bear: or, pour water on his head out of a tea-kettle:
475. Or, let him eat nothing but apples for a month:
476. Or, nothing but bread and milk: tried.

153. Bite of a Mad Dog.

477. Plunge into cold water daily for twenty days, and keep as long under as possible. This has cured, even after the hydrophobia was begun.
478. Or, mix ashes of trefoil with hog's-lard, and anoint the part as soon as possible. Repeat it twice or thrice at six hours distance. This has cured many: and particularly a dog bit on the nose by a mad dog.
479. Or, mix a pound of salt, with a quart of water. Squeeze, bathe, and wash the wound with this for an hour. Then bind some salt upon it for twelve hours.
N.B. The Author of this receipt was bit six times by mad dogs, and always cured himself by this means.
480. Or, mix powdered liver-wort, four drachms: black pepper, two drachms. Divide this into four parts, and take one in warm milk for four mornings, fasting. Dr. Mead affirms he never knew this to fail: but it has sometimes failed.
481. Or, take two or three spoonfuls of ribwort, morning and evening, as soon as possible after the bite. Repeat this for two or three changes of the moon. It has not been known to fail.
482. Immediately consult an honest physician.

References:

Ingram, Allan. Patterns of Madness In The Eighteenth Century: A Reader. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998.

Madden, Deborah. 'A Cheap, Safe and Natural Medicine': Religion, Medicine and Culture in John Wesley's Primitive Physic (Amsterdam/New York: Rodolpi, 2007).

Maddox, Randy.  “John Wesley on Holistic Health and Healing” in Methodist History, 46:1 (October 2007), 4-33.

LSD Visit To "Inner Space"

LSD - The Consciousness-Expanding Drug is the title of a classic anthology compiled by David Solomon in the mid-Sixties, that contained informative articles on the subject of LSD use by a cross-section of intellectuals and pop-culture figures of the day, including Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, and William S. Burroughs. It became a best-seller; partly because it was itself a reactionary text written at a time when mainstream LSD use was coming under fire from the police, government, and the media, and partly because of the number of articles written by doctors and other experts that reported the amazing therapeutic effects of LSD use in psychotherapy as well as the treatment and care of alcoholism and other mental disorders. The Hippie revolution was in full swing, and people looked to comprehensive and authoritative-sounding work in order to justify their use of the drug as well as engage with others in debate and discussion. 

Solomon, in his preface, speak of his own LSD usage as well as experiments with mescaline and psylocybin:

"My first psychedelic experience was triggered by 400 milligrams of mescaline sulfate. It did indeed induce a flight, but instead of fleeing from reality, I flew more deeply into it. I had never before seen, touched, tasted, heard, smelled and felt so profound a personal unity and involvement with the concrete material world. My psychedelically accelerated mind did not merely grasp the symbolic poetic import, the utter simplicity and truth of William Blake's ecstatic vision: for the first time in my life I literally saw "the world in a grain of sand." My exponentially heightened awareness saw through the static, one-dimensional, ego-constricted, false front which is the consciousness-contracted reality of the everyday world. This was no evasive flight from, but a deep probe into reality."

One article by Houston Smith in the book discusses the religious import of LSD usage, and asks whether Prof. R. C. Zaehner's criticism of LSD-induced religious hallucinations as being of an inferior quality to the apparently genuine nature of 'authentic' religious visionary experience, is justified. I like the way he rebuts the question by, after briefly describing mystical drug usage in other religions, suggesting that to consider the phenomenology of the experience was more important than the ontology, fully aware of the limits of scientific research at the time and leaving it as an open question to be answered by future research.

The text also contains a rather long and experiential account of LSD intoxication by Alan Harrington, entitled 'A Visit to the Inner Space', after he embarked on a marathon trip with two friends:

"A twelve-hour session under the influence of the mind-dilating compound LSD-25 dispatched me on a trip through the cosmos inside my head. LSD enables everyone to become an astronaut of himself. During this flight beyond time into the depths of consciousness, to what must be the memory source of humanity, each of us can explore an inward universe filled with both violent and peaceful revelations ... Seventy-two hours after the night voyage, the emotional effect begins to fade. But details of the experience remain clear. Things seen by one's dilated eyes and the mind's eye will not be forgotten. Some of the more intellectual insights remain, too. I am speaking here of only one session—the initial, shocking one. You may be able to take off on other, much more easy, inward journeys. Unlike the first trip, these can be "programmed" to orbit you around a given life problem.

"A single LSD session will not be likely to produce a great and lasting change in one's life. But it shows the way to change. My first experience opened up paths of thinking that I never knew existed. I know that the vision revealed by psycho-chemicals can help overcome feelings of alienation and loneliness; it can make death appear somewhat less fearful. The common vision of immortality, revealed in one way or another to most people under LSD, indicates the possibility of my survival in some form, my ever-returning to life ... It began with a salty taste in my mouth, and my vision started to become prismatic. (One's pupils actually dilate and appear to be the size of quarters.) There was a pressure in my head. The curtains seemed to billow. There might be somebody behind them. The air crackled silently. I had a feeling of colored musical notes floating about, and the scene, I can remark now, was quite like a Klee drawing. I felt a bit queasy, but it passed. The music was louder and the guitar strings beautifully separated. Ralph was looking at me, and I began to laugh. I was going to flip on my tape recorder! What a ridiculous, hilarious thing to do! Why not, though? "Why not?" Frank said, and we both laughed. I couldn't stop. Everything that I could think about was insanely and pitifully funny. The world. The universe. All the poor sweet pitiful people I knew. Myself. What a scene! Filled with noble, ridiculous people! The world, the world!

"This reaction which is Cosmic Laughter was different from any way of laughing I had known. It came out of me as though propelled by a force much larger than the person laughing. It came right up from the center of my being. The force continued throughout the major part of the experience, no matter what I was feeling. It resembled both a mild and sustained electric shock passing through the body and spirit, and a mild and incomplete and continuing orgasm. A throbbing and rhythmic current which for want of a fresh image—and one is no longer afraid of being banal—could be described as the life force shakes you, as if you might be aboard or bestride, or being carried along with, the force that penetrates and then fills all being."

A lot of interesting things in this classic book, which may result in further articles here.

See Reality Studio for more information on David Solomon.

Virginia Woolf's Last Letter

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was one of the foremost literary figures of the 20th Century, having produced several novels, short stories, and diaries. A number of traumatic events in her life, such as the death of her parents in her teens and sexual abuse at the hands of her half-brothers, may have contributed to the depression that plagued her throughout her life. Although her literary output remains largely unaffected, she was subject to periodic mood swings and associated illnesses until her suicide at age 59.

In a letter to her husband, regarded as her suicide note, she revealed a glimpse of life as a voice-hearer:


Transcript:

Tuesday.

Dearest,

I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that - everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer.

I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.

V.

700-year-old Brain Found Preserved!

Evolutionary psychology tends to receive harsh criticism, and often rightly so. One of the main reasons for this is the severe lack of evidence for many of it's proposals given that the paucity of fossilised brains fails to bolster many a case. And it isn't even anyone's fault. That's just the way it goes sometimes, that the brain is a jelly-like substance that is subject to decay after death, and there's no way we can objectively analyse or verify any differences in brains of long ago with brains of today.

This isn't set to change anytime soon, but the remarkable discovery of a medieval child's brain was the subject of a Neuroimage paper published recently. This is extremely exciting on many counts: the brain has been so fantastically preserved that it is possible to identify the frontal, temporal and occipital lobes, and even the sulci and gyri, the grooves and furrows channeled into brains.



However it is only the left-hemisphere that survived and not the entire brain, which had also shrunk to about 80% of it's original weight due to the (natural) mummification process. Although it was first discovered in 1998 and preserved all this time in a formalin solution, it was found in the skull of a 13th Century infant that was exhumed at an archaeological dig in north-west France. The body of the 18-month-old child was wrapped in leather and kept in a wooden coffin with a pillow underneath the head.

The presence of acidic clay soil and fresh briny water around the burial site is believed to have contributed towards the excellent preservation of the brain. To a certain degree, even the innate cellular structure had been preserved, so much so that intact neurons and dendrites - branched fibres that extend from the cell body of a neuron - had survived for observation in the 21st Century. It was also possible to identify grey and white matter. Apart from the external burial conditions, the toughness of the neuronal myelin sheath and collagen fibres are said to be the reasons for why the brain tissue had been nicely preserved.

It cannot be said for sure how the infant died, but the presence of an unhealed circular head fracture may have been the likeliest cause. High levels of hemosiderin suggested that the infant had heavy bleeding for several days prior to death. Poor little mite.
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Papageorgopoulou, C., Rentsch, K., Raghavan, M., Hofmann, M., Colacicco, G., Gallien, V., Bianucci, R., & Rühli, F. (2010). Preservation of cell structures in a medieval infant brain: A paleohistological, paleogenetic, radiological and physico-chemical study NeuroImage, 50 (3), 893-901 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.01.029

The Edwin Smith Papyrus

One of the earliest medical documents describing the effects of brain damage on function is the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, dating from the 17th Century and named after the Egyptologist who discovered it. It is thought to be a copy of an earlier composite manuscript dated around 3000-2500 BC.

(An extract from the papyrus, original on left and 'clean' version on right)

Using hieroglyphs, the manuscript describes 48 separate observations (case studies) of brain and spinal injury as well as the treatment used in each. Altogether an extraordinary document that was probably the first to contain descriptions of various brain structures including cranial sutures, meninges, external surface (neocortex), cerebrospinal fluid, and is even the first scientific document to use the word 'brain'.

The manuscript also contains the first reported case of disorders such as quadriplegia, urinary incontinence, priaprism, as well as seminal emission following vertebral dislocation. Many of the cases are presented in something of a formal format: Title, examination, diagnosis, treatment.

The following is Case Two of the Edwin Smith papyrus and describes a wound to the head:

Title: Instructions concerning a [gaping] wound [in his head], penetrating to the bone.
Examination: If thou examinest a man having a [gaping] wound [in] his [head], penetrating to the bone, thou shouldst lay thy hand upon it (and) [thou shouldst] pal[pate hi]s wound. If thou findest his skull [uninjured, not hav]ing a perforation in it...
Diagnosis: Thou shouldst say regarding [him]: 'One hav[ing a gaping wou]nd in his head. An ailment which I will treat'.
Treatment: [Thou] shouldst bind [fresh meat upon it the first day; thou shouldst apply for him two strips of linen, and treat afterward with grease, honey (and) lin]t every day until he recovers.
Gloss: As for 'two strips of linen,' [it means] two bands [of linen which one applies upon the two lips of the gaping wound in order to cause that one join] to the other.

(Materials from G. Neil Martin's Human Neuropsychology, 2nd ed.)