The reasonableness of Clayton's pathology is impressive, but reason did lead to some bizarre—in the light of present-day medical knowledge—conclusions. Aware of the value to the scientist of close observation and of the necessity to reason about these observations, Clayton was in the finest seventeenth-century scientific tradition. Observing a lady—for example—suffering from lead poisoning, he noted that her distress, judging by her behavior, varied directly with the nearness and bigness of the passing clouds; the nearer the clouds, the more anguished her groans. Reason dictated to Clayton that such a phenomenon stemmed from a cause-effect relationship.
Although the twentieth-century physician would deny the cloud-suffering association, he would not deny Clayton's propensity for observation and his attempts to discern relationships. The approach of the better seventeenth-century Virginia physician can be labeled scientific even if his facts were few.
Drugs and Other Remedies
No seventeenth-century physician could function without a variety of drugs (medicines) to dispense. Dr. Pott made special arrangements—for example—to have a chest of drugs transported with him from England to America, and the effectiveness of Dr. Bohun's "physicke" drew the praise of the colonists. Drugs were essential to the physician and a valuable commodity for export, as well. The subject of drugs must then include a discussion of their use as medicines and their importance as items of trade.
A study of the drugs in use and the occasions of their utilization makes manifest the great part that freeing the body from corrupting matter played in the treatment of disease. The theorists and clinical physicians of the century placed such faith in the humoral doctrine that, on the basis of this predilection, much of the opposition to cinchona, or quinine, in a period greatly troubled by malaria, can be explained. Cinchona, discovered in Spanish America and known in seventeenth-century Europe, had demonstrable effects in the treatment of malaria but, because it was an additive rather than a purgative, physicians rejected it on theoretical grounds. Its eventual acceptance later revolutionized drug therapeutics, but this revolution did not affect seventeenth-century Virginia.
The emphasis that the contemporary medical men placed upon the purging of the body—the vomiting, sweating, purgings of the bowels, the draining, and the bleeding—cannot be considered irrational or quaint. In the light of observation and common sense, to purge seemed not only reasonable and natural but in accord with orthodox doctrine as well. Observation revealed that illness was frequently accompanied by an excess of fluid or matter in the body, as in the case of colds, respiratory disorders, swollen joints, diarrheas, or the skin eruptions that accompanied such epidemic diseases as the plague or smallpox. Common sense dictated a freeing of the body of the corrupt or corrupting matter; drugs were a means to this end.
The use of drugs for vomiting, sweating, and other forms of purging seems excessive in the light of present-day medical knowledge, and at least one seventeenth-century Virginia student of medicine also found such use of drugs by his contemporaries open to criticism. In the opinion of the Reverend John Clayton, Virginia doctors were so prone to associate all drugs with vomiting or other forms of purging that they even thought of aromatic spirits as an inferior "vomitive." He concluded that these physicians would purge violently even for an aching finger: "they immediately [upon examining the patients] give three or four spoonfuls [of crocus metallorum] ... then perhaps purge them with fifteen or twenty grains of the rosin of jalap, afterwards sweat them with Venice treacle, powder of snakeroot, or Gascoin's Powder; and when these fail conclamatum est."
The list of drugs used was extensive and each drug had a considerable literature written about it explaining the various sicknesses and disorders for which it was a curative. Libraries of the Virginia physicians and of the well-to-do laymen usually included a volume or two on the use of drugs. Among the most popular plants, roots, and other natural products were snakeroot, dittany, senna, alum, sweet gums, and tobacco.
Dittany drove worms out of the body and would also produce sweat (sweating being another popular method of purging the body of disease-producing matter). The juices of the fever or ague-root in beer or water "purgeth downward with some violence ... in powder ... it only moveth sweat." (Following Galen's system of classifying by taste, this root was bitter, therefore thought dry. The physician would administer such a drying agent when attempting to reduce excess moistness in the body—and thus restore normal body balance, in accord with contemporary humoral theory.) Snakeroot, another of the popular therapeutics, increased the output of urine and of perspiration; black snakeroot, remedying rheumatism, gout, and amenorrhea, found such wide usage during the last half of the seventeenth century that its price per pound in Virginia on one occasion rose from ten shillings to three pounds sterling. Although King James I of England saw much danger in tobacco, others among his subjects attributed phenomenal curative properties to it. One late sixteenth-century commentator on America recommended it as a purge for superfluous phlegm; and smokers believed it functioned as an antidote for poisons, as an expellant for "sour" humors, and as a healer of wounds. Some doctors maintained that it would heal gout and the ague, act as a stimulant and appetite depressant, and counteract drunkenness.
The full significance of these drugs in the medicine of the period can be better appreciated by reference to a prescription for their use, in this instance a remedy for rickets, thought typical by historian Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker: