Truly, the poor rickety child deserved to be cured. Snails also were used externally:
"To anoint the Ricketed Childs Limbs and to recover it in a short time, though the child be so lame as to go upon crutches:
"Take a peck of Garden Snailes and bruse them, put them into a course Canvass bagg, and hang it up, and set a dish under to receive the liquor that droppeth from them, wherewith anoint the Childe in every Joynt which you perceive to be weak before the fire every morning and evening. This I have known make a Patient Childe that was extream weak to go alone using it only a week time."
There were also "unguents to anoynt the Ricketted Childs breast," and various drinks to be given "to the patient childe fasting," as they termed him in what appears to us a half-comic, though wholly truthful appellation.
For worms and fits there were some frightful doses of senna and rhubarb and snails, with a slight redeeming admixture of prunes; and as for "Collick" and "Stomack-Ach," I feel sure every respectable Puritan patient child died rather than swallow the disgusting and nauseous compounds that were offered to him for his relief.
Puritan babies also wore medical ornaments, "anodyne necklaces." I find them advertised in the Boston Evening Post as late as 1771—"Anodine Necklaces for the Easy breeding of Childrens Teeth," worn as nowadays children wear strings of amber beads to avert croup.
Another medicine "to make children's teeth come without paine" was this: "Take the head of a Hare boyled a walm or two or roahed; and with the braine thereof mingle Honey and butter and therewith anoynt the Childes gums as often as you please." Still further advice was to scratch the child's gums with an osprey bone, or to hang fawn's teeth or wolf's fangs around his neck—an ugly necklace.
The first scene of gayety upon which the chilled baby opened his sad eyes was when his mother was taken from her great bed and "laid on a pallat," and the heavy curtains and valances of harrateen or serge were hung within and freshened with "curteyns and vallants of cheney or calico." Then, or a day or two later, the midwife, the nurses, and all the neighboring women who had helped with advice or work in the household during the first week or two of the child's life, were bidden to a dinner. This was also a French fashion, as "Les Caquets de l'Accouchée," the popular book of the time of Louis XIII., proves.
Doubtless at this New England amphidromia the "groaning beer" was drunk, though Sewall "brewed my Wives Groaning Beer" two months before the child was born. By tradition, "groaning cake," to be used at the time of the birth of the child, and given to visitors for a week or two later, also was made; but I find no allusion to it under that name in any of the diaries of the times. At this women's dinner good substantial viands were served. "Women din'd with rost Beef and minc'd Pyes, good Cheese and Tarts." When another Sewall baby was scarcely two weeks old, seventeen women were dined at Judge Sewall's on equally solid meats, "Boil'd Pork, Beef, Fowls, very good Rost Beef, Turkey, Pye and Tarts." Madam Downing gave her women "plenty of sack and claret." A survival of this custom existed for many years in the fashion of drinking caudle at the bedside of the mother.
As might be expected of a man who diverted himself in attending the dissection of an Indian, which gruesome gayety exhilarated him into spending a tidy sum—for him—on drinks and feeing "the maid;" and in visiting his family tomb; and who, when he took his wife on a pleasure trip to Dorchester "to eat cherries and rasberries," spent his entire day within-doors reading that cheerful book, Calvin on Psalms;—in the house of such a pleasure-seeker but small provision was made for the entertainment or amusement of his children. They were sometimes led solemnly to the house of some old, influential, or pious person, who formally gave them his blessing. He took them also to some of the funerals of the endless procession of dead Bostonians that files sombrely through the pages of his diary, to the funeral of their baby brother, little Stephen Sewall, when "Sam and his sisters (who were about five and six years old) cryed much coming home and at home, so that I could hardly quiet them. It seems they looked into Tomb, and Sam said he saw a great Coffin there, his Grandfathers." These were not the only tears that Sam and Betty and Hannah shed through fear of death. When Betty was a year older her father wrote: