‘Words are but the shell:’ Can Plants Help Us, Historically? The Plant, the Nation, and the Infant

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Anglo-American colonist Elizabeth Hanson’s infant inexplicably survived captivity with her mother in 1725 amongst the Abenaki. Abenaki men thought the infant was demonic; the French thought it was divinely selected for survival, a “Child order’d for longer life.” Both explanations stemmed from what they believed to be the infant’s survival despite supposed utter deprivation of food and medicine, but Hanson knew better. Her baby lived because of simple recipes for an early version of what we would perhaps today call baby formula, shared with her in whispered conversations with Abenaki women, young and old.^[1]

If only we could touch that quasi-baby formula. Material culture –objects from the past – could skirt biases in Hanson’s narrative. But alimentary and medicinal history is inherently ephemeral; we can describe it, but no narrative will make it literally tangible. Why, then, do historians insist on studying such fleeting sources? The ‘quotidian’ care of infants and pregnant bodies can give us insight into unexpected history, from contact between disparate peoples to the foundations of the early American state, even if we prefer to leave the suckling and wailing of pregnancy and birth far from our founding documents.

Early modern Anglo-American men sent home their tidings of success in the colonies, lauding their ability to thrive amongst the inhospitable. They argued that they, in fact, had always been meant to colonize this land, because, in part, the climactic shift had not humorally affected them. But in order for one to ‘thrive,’ one must ensure their children survive infancy, maintain a steady flow of women capable of conceiving and carrying fetuses to term, and, most importantly, weather the precarious postpartum period that was dangerous for mother and infant.

Historian Mary Beth Norton argued that in early colonial North America, family and state were “analogous institutions,” in the sense that both were premised upon a paternalistic male head and the reproductivity of women.^[2] Thus, women were responsible for maintaining fertility in order to continually produce infants that could populate their colonized and expanding territory. But how did Englishwomen import and shape their preexisting medical worldviews – based on the Galenic theory of humors – to fit the reproductive healthcare they would require to survive population and colonization processes in a different environment? Firstly, they would not have been left in total confusion, but likely could have looked forward to some overlaps and collaboration, willing or otherwise, with Indigenous medicine. As literary and cultural historians Kelly Wisecup and Ralph Bauer have respectively argued, both emphasized a permeability of the body, the natural world, and the supernatural.^[3] This means we should endorse a more middle-ground reciprocity of medical knowledge.^[4] Within this framework, scholars can view previously invisible worlds of cultural and economic interaction between Indigenous and settler groups while still grappling with the often violent results that may emerge.^[5]

But often, these methodological approaches have still led historians to a story that neglects women, despite their pivotal role in healing and survival in both Indigenous American and English settler groups. Referring to Englishwomen, historian Margaret Pelling has argued that when illness or poor health occurred (or was threatened), the women of the home were “the first port of call.”^[6] How was the natalist conquest of early Northeast America fueled by this piecemeal process of filling a pharmacopeia full of the familiar, and stuffing the unfamiliar into known molds? How do we investigate this process as historians, when both Indigenous and English women left few records behind?

Plants and Birth Pangs

We can begin to locate a middle ground in material culture, as it allows us to temporarily bypass traditional written sources that privilege Western narratives. However, plants do not necessarily fit neatly into this category; we simply cannot possess or understand the historical plant by examining the modern plant. It may not be biologically different in any significant way, but our body and society’s relationship with vegetal life and the environment is quite different from what it was in the past. There is very little chance I can hold a comfrey flower used by a seventeenth century woman, even if I could theoretically craft a detailed map of their growth patterns. But plants and vegetal life can teach us about the past, the present, and the future, so we owe it to ourselves to try.

In the history of medicine, we use the term materia medica to refer to a substance or plant with pharmacological uses, following the example set by the 1st century AD Greek pharmacist Dioscorides’ text, De materia medica. Taking a comparative approach and using materia medica as the object of analysis demonstrates how survival and reproduction were negotiated under the colonial state. But the historical record contains one glaringly large issue when it comes to the recovery of Indigenous reproductive cures: English colonists recorded that Indigenous women gave birth in total isolation, did not feel pain while doing so, and recovered almost immediately. In 1634, writer William Wood informed English readers that for Indigenous women in New England, “a bigge bellie hinders no business, nor a childebirthe takes much time.”^[7] The infants were then immediately carried by their mothers as they began to work again, a mere three or four days following delivery – supposedly. This assumption about the body of the Indigenous women would go on to inform definitions of biological racial difference, as non-white women in particular were surmised to feel no or less pain during birth and pregnancy.^[8]

Attempts – and failures – to require licensing for folk practitioners in England, a supposed historical medicalization of society, began in the seventeenth century. It carried an impression of the ‘exotic’ and botanical as the domain of the peasant, feminine, and rhetorically synonymous “savage.” These shifts and stagnancies continued when the English crossed the Atlantic and sought out similar or exact matches to their familiar cures. Lay medical knowledge did not require the scholar as mediator, because the doctrine of signatures could be recognized by any seeker, trained or not.^[9] Thus, the midwife and women become, in historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s words, “mediators of life and death,” imbricated in colonial society and responsible for its survival.^[10] English colonizers were capable of surviving birth and the period following delivery at a higher rate than their forebears back in England, and Indigenous uses of similar, but not identical plants, to the ones so well known to Englishwomen mirrored their own uses.^[11]

Flow and the Fetus

Those uses that Englishwomen found for herbs were by and large based on the ancient Hippocratic corpus, which dictated the lion’s share of early modern European medical theory. Central to this corpus was the theory of the ‘humors,’ the four fluids (black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood) that ruled the human body and controlled health and illness. Someone achieved peak health when their humoral balance was equal and suited to the individual’s condition, climate, and identity. Plants, beasts, and people risked moral, customary, and medical degeneration when they left their native lands.^[12] A hot climatic change would cool the man’s body and heat the woman’s, and the overheated female body over-menstruated, expelled fetuses, and failed to purify blood into seed.^[13] Heat threatened reproduction, and failure to reproduce threatened the colonial project.

The importance of the humors, which were fluids that could be visually diagnosed, meant the healing patient should be vomiting, bleeding, urinating, defecating, sweating, or crying, such that the “flow” of the body was enacted again, the humors rigorously working to right themselves. According to early modern medical theory, then, proper flow of the humors, especially blood, was necessary to maintain the health of the female body. Among these types of flow, menstruation, birth, and lactation were the most important. Therefore, abortifacients and emmenagogues – herbal agents which increase blood circulation to the pelvic area, cause uterine contractions and stimulate menstruation – were not necessarily illicit.^[14] Modern and historical studies have demonstrated that pennyroyal is an abortifacient, but its historical uses went beyond this purpose.^[15] Seventeenth century English herbalist and political agitator Nicholas Culpeper wrote that the herb warms humoral coldness, provokes menstruation, and expels dead fetuses and afterbirth (the placenta).^[16]

The emphasis on flow also appears to have been mirrored within many Indigenous reproductive remedies as well. Historian Nancy Shoemaker has demonstrated that the Seneca practiced some form of herbal family limitation for centuries preconquest.^[17] Moreover, the emphasis that both myriad European cultures and Indigenous American tribes placed on the use of sweat lodges and herb smoking for healthcare purposes demonstrates a communal interest in flow, this time through sweat and emotional or spiritual release.^[18]

A desire for proper flow is reflected in the new materia medica the English took from Indigenous populations: the Haudenosaunee used lamb’s quarters to prevent milk flow when the child was stillborn, and the popular black snakeroot to promote it when the child was healthy.^[19] Back in England, Mary Kettilby recommended a mixture of herbs including “Virginia snake-weed” for use “in any malignant distemper,” and Benjamin Smith Barton praised it in 1798 as “a valuable medicine” that is “sometimes called Squaw-root…from its having been used as a medicine by our Indians,” who “set a high value on it.^[20] The squaw-root term results from black snakeroot’s omnipresence in Indigenous midwifery pharmacopeia for its promotion of slow labor.^[21] Europeans had observed quite early that the Rappahannock people, located in Virginia, also used pennyroyal and spicebush tea for menstrual pain.^[22] The Mohegan people considered the infusion of pennyroyal leaves to be “warming and good for [the] stomach.”^[23]

Despite the evidence from Woode demonstrating that Englishmen were uninterested in Indigenous birth, there are historiographical arguments pointing to the fact that English women likely would have been. Historian Olivia Weisser argues that Englishwomen on the Continent tended to look to others as “models of suffering.”^[24] This analysis indicates that Englishwomen would have sought models in Indigenous women in order to properly integrate Indigenous materia medica into their Galenic worldviews.

IV. A ‘New World’ of Reproductive Control

The history of reproductive health care, told through plants and the bodies of women, is also the history of a nation. In the United States, women are repeatedly sidelined in the pursuit of population growth. Fetal abnormalities have been blamed on Tylenol consumption, while conservative thinkpieces in mainstream news bemoan late-motherhood as the downfall of society. The right to legal abortion was overturned in the Supreme Court in 2022, and a backdoor abortion ban nearly slipped through the cracks during the recent government shutdown.

Much of this pro-natalist legislation and overall zeitgeist is predicated on an imagined past in which women have always maintained the simple, ‘domestic’ task of childbearing, something private and separate entirely from the political sphere. But women’s bodies have always been publicized: the work to gain control of them has been the primary objective of the state from the early modern period straight through modernity. It is necessary that we study history, even when it is obscured and biological, if only to wrest back rightful control of our own bodies.

Feature image caption: Excerpt from Jane Sharp, The midwives book, or, The whole art of midwifry discovered: Directing childbearing women how to behave themselves in their conception, breeding, bearing, and nursing of children in six books. (Wellcome Collection, Page 119).

Notes

1. Elizabeth Hanson, God’s Mercy surmounting man’s cruelty, exemplified in the captivity and redemption of Elizabeth Hanson, Philadelphia, 1728, Evans Early American Imprint Collection, University of Michigan Library Digital Collections, 33. ↑
2. Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society, 1st ed. A.A. Knopf, 1996, 4. ↑
3. Kelly Wisecup, Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures, Native Americans of the Northeast, University of Massachusetts Press, 2013, 2-3. ↑
4. Ralph Bauer, “A New World of Secrets: Occult Philosophy and Local Knowledge in the Sixteenth-Century Atlantic,” Science and Empire in the Atlantic World, Routledge, 2008, 100. ↑
5. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815, 20th anniversary ed. Cambridge University Press, 2011. ↑
6. Margaret Pelling, ‘”Thoroughly Resented?” Older Women and the Medical Role in Early Modern London’, in Women, Science, and Medicine 1500-1700, 70. ↑
7. William Wood, New England’s Prospect, London, 1634, in Jean M. O’Brien, “‘Divorced’ from the Land: Resistance and Survival of Indian Women in Eighteenth-Century New England,” Rebecca Kugel and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, eds., Native Women’s History in Eastern North America before 1900: A Guide to Research and Writing, University of Nebraska Press, 2007, 353. ↑
8. This phenomenon as it applies to black women in history has been assessed by Jennifer Morgan (Laboring Women, 2004) and Deirdre Cooper Owens (Medical Bondage, 2017). ↑
9. Alix Cooper, Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 37-38. ↑
10. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and Martha Ballard, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812, 1st Vintage Books ed. Vintage Books, 1991, 47. ↑
11. Joyce E. Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500 – 1676, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001, 116-117. ↑
12. Cooper, Inventing the Indigenous, 44. ↑
13. Chaplin, Subject Matter, 133-134. ↑
14. Dinesh Kumar, Ajay Kumar, and Om Prakash, “Potential Antifertility Agents from Plants: A Comprehensive Review,” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 140, no. 1 (2012): 1–32). ↑
15. For the historical cases, see, among others: John M. Riddle, Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997; Carla Spivack, “To ‘Bring down the Flowers’: The Cultural Context of Abortion Law in Early Modern England,” William & Mary Journal of Women and the Law 14, no. 1 (2007): 107–.For modern scientific studies, see Chris Feng, Kathryn E. Fay, and Michele M. Burns, “Toxicities of Herbal Abortifacients,” The American Journal of Emergency Medicine 68 (2023), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajem.2023.03.005, 43. ↑
16. Nicholas Culpeper, Culpeper’s Complete Herbal: Over 400 Herbs and their Uses (1652), edited by Diana Vowles, Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2009, 282. ↑
17. Nancy Shoemaker, “The Rise or Fall of Iroquois Women,” in Native Women’s History in Eastern North America before 1900: A Guide to Research and Writing, eds. Rebecca Kugel and Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, University of Nebraska Press, 2007, 318. ↑
18. James and Dorothy Volo, Family Life in Native America, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2007, 95. ↑
19. Herrick, Iroquois Botany, 142 & 119. ↑
20. Mary Kettilby. A collection of above three hundred receipts in cookery, physick and surgery: for the use of all good wives, tender mothers, and careful nurses. The second edition. London: Printed for Mary Kettilby, 1719. National Library of Medicine. http://resource.nlm.nih.gov, 133-134; Benjamin Smith Barton, Collections for an Essay towards a Materia Medica of the United States, Philadelphia, 1798, The National Library of Medicine, 9. ↑
21. Rebecca J. Tannenbaum, Health and Wellness in Colonial America, Health and Wellness in Daily Life, Greenwood, 2012, 60-61. ↑
22. Tannenbaum, Health and Wellness, 55. ↑
23. Gladys Tantaquidgeon, Folk Medicine of the Delaware and Related Algonkian Indians, Pennsylvania Historical Commission Anthropological Papers #3, 1972, 72. ↑
24. Olivia Weisser, Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, and Belief in Early Modern England, Yale University Press, 2015, 3. ↑