Caution: The following descriptions and videos are to provide historical perspectives on frontier life. No claims are made for the efficacy or safety of any of these historical medicinal applications.
 |
| View original article here. |
Benjamin Rush's Thunderbolts were both the savior and the scourge of the Corps of Discovery. Meriwether Lewis was known to have liberally dispensed the powerful purgatives as the reputed "cure all" for what ailed them. Call them what you will, Thunderbolts or Thunderclappers, they gave members of the Corp that "get up and go" feeling!
To quote a posting from Oregon's Offbeat History:
"...As Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery worked its way across North America to Oregon’s Fort Clatsop, it left something behind that would prove invaluable to future historians:
Laxatives..
This sounds trivial today, but at the time laxatives (or, rather, purgatives in general) were a big deal. The Corps left on its journey long before anyone knew what a microbe was, and physicians knew almost nothing about how the human body worked. What they had was a basic theory, which had come down to them from about 150 A.D., courtesy of a Roman doctor named Galen. The idea was that illness was caused by an imbalance in the body’s “humors,” or fluids – blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. Too much blood caused problems like fevers; the answer was to let a pint or two of blood out of the patient. And too much bile caused problems like constipation; the answer was to give the patient a powerful laxative or emetic to cause frenetic purging, from one end or the other.
Wonder drug that works wonders
By the time of the American revolution, a substance called “calomel” was the laxative of choice.
Calomel was the wonder drug of the age. In large doses, it functioned as a savage purgative, causing lengthy and productive sessions in the outhouse, guaranteeing the restoration of one’s bile balance. And in small doses, it was effective against the most dreaded “social disease” of the age, syphilis.
But take too much of it and your teeth would fall out, and you might die of mercury poisoning. Calomel’s modern scientific name is mercury chloride.
When the Corps of Discovery left the East Coast, Lewis and Clark brought with them several pounds of mercury chloride – in the form of dozens and dozens of beefy white tablets labeled “Dr. Rush’s Bilious Pills.” These pills were almost 50 percent calomel – and they were big pills, at least four times the size of an aspirin tablet..." *
Home-Grown Herbal Medicines
Medicines in the late 18th century were often plant based remedies, and many settlers on the frontier probably planted an herb garden to be sure that they would have a reliable supply of medicinal plants. Here are some videos from The Townsends Channel covering medicines derived from plants grown on the homestead. I've posted some of them before, but I thought you might like the convenience of having them all in one place.
"There are old long hunters,
There are bold long hunters,
But there are no old bold long hunters."
Caution: The above descriptions and videos are to provide historical perspectives on frontier life. No claims are made for the efficacy or safety of any of these historical medicinal applications.