Dog Grease and Cat Guts: A 17th-Century Bishop's Recipe Book
Bishop Seth Ward of Salisbury was concerned for his health. In fact, he may have been a little obsessed.
Warning. Some of the content below is quite gruesome.
During the 1670s, Seth kept a notebook, a personal compendium of useful knowledge, in which, along with observations about his diocese, he noted recipes for tinctures, tonics, purgatives, and pastes, as well as plants suitable for broth, and the address of a chemist recommended by Mr John Wilson. One tonic took the roots of dandelion, couch grass, fennel root, asparagus, chicory, eight grey snails without shells ‘unbowelled and cleansed', some deer antler and half a skinless cockerel. The mixture was boiled until it was reduced by half and kept in an earthen pot in a cool place. The tonic was intended to be drunk for breakfast and supper. Another concoction used millipedes that were dried in an oven. The insects were powdered to form a preparation that could be added to a tonic.
Seth's book also contained medication for sick horses, including two remedies for farcy, a bacterial disease that caused nodules on the skin. One of these cures required stuffing ground-up spearwort, butter and bay into the horse's ears and binding them closed for 12 hours.
For a cold, Seth suggested a concoction created by boiling a deer antler in a milky drink infused with liquorice, and then sweetened with syrup of maidenhair, probably referring to the plant rather than the hair of a chaste woman. Some remedies were set down in English, while others were in Latin. Some had the names of practitioners from whom he had taken the remedy like Dr Willis, Dr Goodard or Dr Marten.
The most problematic of Seth’s preparations in twenty-first-century terms are probably those which utilise parts of dead dogs and cats in remedies to cure gout. In one, various ingredients were combined, including red lead, olive oil, 'dog's grease' (undefined), honey, wax, turpentine, and stone pitch, which was heated and cooled to create a plaster that could be applied to gouty joints. The other suggested taking 'an old fatt cat', skinning it, removing its guts and then beating it well with a rolling pin and then putting it 'all together into the belly of a fat gander' with pepper, mustard, parsley, garlic and wormwood. This was roasted, and the grease was applied to the afflicted area.
Seth Ward by John Greenhill
Before his career within the Church of England, Seth had been a Professor of Astronomy at Oxford University. He was also a noted mathematician and a founder member of the Royal Society, the oldest national scientific society in the world. He was friends with many of the Society’s luminaries, such as Sir Christopher Wren, the architect of St Paul’s Cathedral, and John Aubrey, now best known as a biographer. According to Aubrey, Seth was ‘a batchelour, and of a most magnificent and munificent mind’. Seth’s practical interest in cures and tonics was reflected in Aubrey’s own; in fact, remedies pepper several of Aubrey’s manuscripts. Wren too had medical opinions, once telling Aubrey that eating strawberries would kill anyone with a brain injury, something Aubrey was inclined not to accept. For men like Seth and, indeed, Aubrey and Wren, there were no rigid boundaries between astronomy, mathematics, architecture, biography or science. Seth’s notebook reveals a mind that embodied the curiosity and practical wisdom that defined the Scientific Revolution even if the remedies he so carefully recorded now seem quite revolting to modern sensibilities.