Seamus O’Caellaigh gave us a glimpse of Tudor medicine and discussed the medical ailments of Henry VIII for Tudor Summit 2018.
Check out his book below:
Pustules, Pestilence and Pain: Tudor Treatments and Ailments of Henry VIII
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Transcript of Seamus O’Caellaigh on The Medical Ailments of Henry VIII:
Heather:
So I’m really excited to introduce our next speaker, who is going to be talking about medicines and plants and the ailments of Henry VIII. This is something that’s so interesting to me, ’cause we all have the stereotype of Henry being so hypochondriacal. And it’s really interesting to hear about the medicinal side of history, right? Something that we don’t really hear as much about.
So let me introduce you to Seamus O’Caellaigh. He has always been interested in the Tudor dynasty, and also the many uses of plants. Look how it merges together. He grew up learning about plants from his grandmother, Ann Kelly, and mother, Diane Prickett. Her love of plants has manifested in Seamus through his love of being out in the wild, looking for medicinal plants.
Through his spending lots of time in the family garden and spending time in the woods in the pacific northwest, he’s most often seen with his head down, looking at the plants along the path, and not at what lies ahead.
So I’m so excited to introduce you to Seamus. We’re gonna jump right into the questions with me asking him about how he got interested in plants in the first place.
Seamus:
I’ve always been interested in genealogy. And specifically the Tudor dynasty. It’s so filled with so much awesomeness. Elizabeth was fantastic. Henry VIII was great, till he started killing people. He really did awesome things. He wrote music and was in medicine and he did all these awesome things. He just went a little off the deep end. So just that whole time period is really interesting.
The clothing is fantastic. I actually almost feel more comfortable in it than I do in regular clothes. And so it’s just a really cool time period.
My grandmother was an avid gardener. She went to school for botany for a little while before she married my grandpa and got derailed with kids and family and things. I grew up surrounded by her garden, and all of her plants and her books on botany and things like that. Which actually, some of the books behind me are actually from her library.
And my mom was an avid gardener as well. So it’s just really, kind of bred in me growing up. I do it a little bit different than they did, obviously, they’re gardeners. I really actually kind of enjoy more walking through the woods and finding plants on the side of the path that used 500 years ago to treat dog bites or human bites or anything. So these things that you see in abandoned lots and on the side of the path, these are actually medicinal plants from 600 years ago. And I’ve always thought that was kind of interesting.
Then thirdly, I’m in a pre-1600’s recreation group. So I get to live as well as I can… we don’t have the plague, thank goodness. We have flushing toilets. But I get to research and have a reason to look for and display apothecary and other medieval and renaissance medicinal items. So I get to play with all kinds of fun things.
So, kind of three reasons I got into it.
Heather:
That’s the SCA that you’re in, right? The–
Seamus:
I am, yeah. Yeah. And what’s really cool–
Heather:
What’s the–
Seamus:
I’m sorry?
Heather:
What’s the name of your character? Or do you have a–
Seamus:
So actually, Seamus is my SCA name. I actually published a book under my SCA name. When talking with Made Global, we kinda had a discussion about whether I should publish it under my birth name or the name I use in SCA. More people know me in the SCA for what I do. And so we published it under Seamus.
Heather:
Okay, cool. That’s great.
Seamus:
And I’m an apothecary, imagine that. Live in about the time of Henry’s reign, when he was married to Jane Seymour and that kind of era.
Heather:
Okay, cool. That’s really cool. I’m just gonna jump right into my questions here then. Can you tell me kind of why you chose to study… I know you said you were interested in plants. What about Henry VIII and his ailments?
Seamus:
So Henry VIII had a lot of ailments. And he was very involved in the medical time. He started the Royal College of Physicians. He mixed the barber surgeon and the Fellowship of Surgeons into one big group. You can see that in the painting by Hans Holbein. He’s handing the charter to one of the physicians. He was an amateur apothecary. He did all these things in the medical field. He’s even had his own still and kinda dabbled in it.
One of the sources I use actually is thought to have had about half of them directly touched by him. So he was involved in the recreation of them or things like that. So he was really actually very involved in medical stuff of the time period, as well as having all these ailments that he likely had these treatments used on him.
Heather:
Can you give me sort of the survey of what was available for doctors and for physicians and almost the difference? Of course there were midwives and doctors and just the lay of the land of what the resources were. And if the average person got sick what they would do, versus the king?
Seamus:
All right. So in the 1400’s, the printing press is invented. So a lot of the medical texts from previous eras were found and republished. Well, not republished ’cause they weren’t published before, but were taken and made more available to learned people.
So for example, the De Materia Medica, which was written in the 1st century, was published in 1478. The Herbal of Apuleius was written in the 4th century. It was also published in the 1400’s. Hildegard’s Herbal, which was written in the 12th century, was also published in the 1400’s. So there’s all these books from the 1st century going forward that were then being put out on the market. A lot of them were being written, being published in Latin. So it would’ve been only available to people who could read Latin.
But these medical texts, which were only available if you had access to one that had been transcribed by hand by a scribe somewhere, were then available to your average doctor. I mean, they weren’t really average, but they had access to these then.
Some of the other tools that they used… So humoral theory was one of the diagnostic tools that they used. And the idea of it… Well, it was originally from ancient Egypt. But it really came into effect in the 400’s. And the idea of it is that our bodies are made up of four different types of humors. Your blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. And when your body gets out of whack, the balances get off, you get sick.
Each person is different. Each person has a different balance. And the idea was that you could tell by someone’s personality, if they were hot-blooded, then they had a lot of blood naturally. So the idea was that if that got out of balance, then you would use treatments to put that back into balance.
So you could use food, activities, different types of air, and then herbs to bring that back into balance. Or, if you didn’t follow the doctor’s directions, if you go farther out of balance, you can get sicker.
Also another item that was used was the zodiac manual, which was originally from the Hellenistic era which was 400 B.C. to 1st century B.C. The idea is that different parts of your body are controlled or ruled over by different zodiacs.
So Aries controls your head, Capricorn controls your knees. But the zodiacs also control different herbs. They control different diseases. So the doctor would have to figure out how the stars were aligned. Where the stars were in which zodiac. Figure out which plants they needed to use against whatever zodiac was ruling that disease and whatever part of the body. It was very complicated.
They actually carried little almanacs that had the stars in them – the star charts. So they could figure that out when they’re out on a house call. So that was one of the other diagnostic items that they used.
The doctrine of signatures was also another thing that they used to determine what to treat the ailments. And it was a little bit more intuitive. The idea was originally from the 1st century. It really became developed and systematic in the 1500’s. But clear through from the 1st century to the Tudor period, it was really used. It was involved in medicine with Galen.
The idea is that the plants tell you what they should be used for. And if you were religious, then the idea was that God was telling you by how he made these plants, what they should do. So eyebright, looks like little eyeballs. And so you would use it for eye ailments. Liverwort is shaped like a liver, so then, therefore, you use it for liver ailments.
Finally, my favorite diagnostic thing is uroscopy, which is the study of urine. Which is kinda weird. So you would look at the urine and see if anything was floating in it. Was it a weird color? Did it smell weird? Did it taste weird? And you would use that to determine what ailment your patient had and how you should treat it.
For example, it’s written if you have bluish or white urine the person has a fever and is in great danger of dying. Or if the urine is blue, then they have an infection in their internal organs. So based on how your urine looked, would help determine what they need to do to fix you.
So these are all the different diagnostic tools that a physician at the time would’ve used. Uroscopy, the zodiac manual, those were all really more for the learned doctors. Whereas humoral theory and the doctrine of signatures kind of probably would’ve been used by anyone who had any sort of medical things or herbal use at home. You know, you could use the intuitive idea of the doctrine of signatures to try and figure out what you needed to use.
Did I answer your question?
Heather:
No, well, kind of. But it’s interesting, ’cause we think about some of these things as being so far-fetched or so primitive. But the idea of looking at urine is something doctors do today still.
Seamus:
Right, oh yeah.
Heather:
It’s not that crazy to think. I mean like tasting it, that’s kind of going a bit far.
Seamus:
You can use it to determine if you had diabetes. Because there’s sugar in your urine. So it actually really does make sense.
Heather:
Yeah, no, it really does. Yeah. I think it’s interesting ’cause I’ve done a lot of learning or studying about pregnancy and childbirth ’cause that’s something I’m really interested in. And some of the different things about the Churching ceremony, which is religious in nature, but they still do that now. You go to your six week appointment and then you’re given the all-clear or whatever. Some of these things might be rooted in religion or in some kind of a belief system of some sort. And yet, it has practical, it’s not that far-fetched. I think it’s kind of interesting. So anyway.
Seamus:
Yeah, actually I did a project where I took Hildegard Von Bingen‘s treatments and I ran them through modern medical texts and found that about 18% of them actually have the active ingredient in them that might not have been on the same level that she had, but there was scientific backing for that actually being used to treat the ailment that she was treating it for. They were a little less reliable at the time than they are now. But there still is quite a bit more than you would think that actually crosses over and could be used modernly.
Heather:
Yeah, I think that’s interesting. Okay so, tell me what happens if somebody gets sick. So I’m just a person. I’m a farmer person and I start to feel sick. What are my options?
Seamus:
So I mean, the average person didn’t really have a whole lot of options. If you happened to be sick when a barber surgeon happened to be traveling through, really you had the midwives. The herb people that lived in your village. People knew what the humors were. And so their ideas would be, “Okay, I think that this humor’s out of balance.” And they would give you the herbs to try and re-balance it. But they really didn’t have the knowledge that a physician would have. Most people didn’t have access to that physician. That was really for the royalty and the wealthy, to-do people that lived in the metropolitan areas.
So if you were just a regular farmer out in the middle of nowhere, you really didn’t have a lot of options. Mostly, you would probably have been treated with whatever your family had in the past treated that person with. The herbs that they picked out of their garden and the culinary herbs. Culinary herbs have a lot of medicinal uses in the period. And so these are the herbs that you would have access to as well as the wild ones that you found interesting, woods or in the meadows.
Heather:
Okay. All right. So then, I’m the queen and I get sick.
Seamus:
Okay. So if you’re the queen, you have multiple physicians that will then run diagnostic tests and try and determine what is out of balance. Check your urine and do all these things. They would put together various treatments. Using the humoral theory, doctrine of signatures, uroscopy, they would determine what is wrong with you. Then they could put together very complicated treatments. I mean, some of the ones in the Tudor texts written by Henry’s physicians contain 12, 14 different ingredients.
Heather:
Wow.
Seamus:
It’s a lot different than a simple rosemary and wine treatment that an average person could’ve used. So it was just a lot more complicated. But they had a lot more education.
Heather:
Yeah. Wasn’t there… this is totally off-topic. Wasn’t there the medical school in Salerno? And what do you know about that?
Seamus:
I actually… I don’t know a whole lot. Italy and… a lot of my focus is on western Europe. But I want to move over and do some more study in other areas. There’s actually a text all about women’s treatments and women’s ailments. And since you’re interested in that kind of thing, if you don’t have it, I’ll lend mine out. But I will get the information to you. But I mean, there are–
Heather:
That was… was that Galen? Galen wrote something big on…
Seamus:
Trotula is the name of the–
Heather:
Trotula, yeah.
Seamus:
Yeah, and it’s all about women’s ailments and women’s illnesses and their treatments. It’s really very interesting.
Heather:
It has some great drawings in it, too.
Seamus:
Yeah, and that actually came from… I believe that school. So I mean, in Italy, they had these big schools, medical places. And they had a lot more. The Renaissance hit Italy a lot sooner than it did England. So–
Heather:
And they allowed women to study there, didn’t they? In Salerno?
Seamus:
Yeah. Yeah.
Heather:
Tell me that. That gets us into this discussion of midwives versus physicians. If a woman was interested in healing, she would become a midwife, then? She couldn’t become a physician?
Seamus:
Right.
Heather:
In England?
Seamus:
Right.
Heather:
Okay.
Seamus:
Correct. Yeah. So William Bullein, which is one of Henry’s medical staff, he was a man. But he wanted to become a doctor and he didn’t. He was called a nurse-surgeon, because he didn’t finish everything. We don’t know what happened but he was called a nurse-surgeon instead of a regular surgeon.
There was lots of different levels within the medical world. You had your actual medical doctors and your surgeons. But there were other things like midwives and nurse surgeons. But yeah. A woman would not have been allowed to study to the extent that a man would’ve.
Heather:
Sure, sure. Okay, so. You, in your introduction to your book, you talk about searching for Henry’s physician’s diary.
Seamus:
Yes.
Heather:
Can you tell me a little bit about that search?
Seamus:
So originally, so I hear about it as “Doctor Butts’ Diary.” And Doctor William Butts is one of the physicians that is on Henry’s right in the Holbein painting of the barber surgeons. He’s in between Thomas… oh, no. John Chambers and Thomas Henry, which was Henry’s royal apothecary.
So the three of them are on one side and Doctor Butts is in the center. He was the doctor to Anne Boleyn, George Boleyn, the Duke of Norfolk, Henry’s son, Henry Fitzroy. He was one of the three authors that actually wrote this handwritten prescription book. It was never published. It’s the only one available. It’s actually in the British Library. And it took me about a year and a half to find it, of searching through all kinds of things.
So it’s also called the Prescription Book of Henry VIII or Henry’s Little Prescription Book. ‘Cause it’s a handwritten one, it wasn’t published, it wasn’t like it had a title. So it was all these different names for it. It’s also Sloane Manuscript 1047.
It contains 200 or so written prescriptions. No extra text really, just “this is what it is used for and this is how you make it.” So for someone who studies apothecary, it was really like that’s what I wanted to find. So after I found it, I learned that it wasn’t just Doctor Butts that wrote it. It was also Walter Cromer, John Chambers, and Agostino degli Agostini, who was not only Henry’s physician but also Wolsey‘s physician.
What’s really cool about it is it’s believed that Henry was involved in about 100 of the prescriptions that are in it. So it really points to the fact that Henry was involved in medical stuff. He was really interested in it. So this treatment is the most, of the treatments that I cover in my book, these are the ones that are most likely were used on Henry. And these are the ones that Henry actually might’ve had actual hands on with it and helped make it before he was treated with it.
So it just was really fascinating text. And little hard to read, it’s all hand-written. Tudor handwriting and with abbreviations. But it’s just one of the most fascinating ones and I really hope to, in the future, delve deeper into it. I wanna do all of the things in it. Yeah, so it’s a really cool text.
Heather:
Cool. And so, that kinda leads me to the next question about Henry being involved in so much. Tell me a little bit about, it makes sense for him to be hypochondriacal. Tell me a little bit about that and about his, the stereotype we have of him as being so hypochondriacal. And every time the sweat hit, he moves castles and only sent his second-best doctor to Anne and all that kind of stuff. What can you tell me about his history and his hypochondria?
Seamus:
Okay, yeah. So his father died of consumption. And that his brother, Arthur, was likely, died of sweating sickness about seven years before that. We don’t know for sure what Arthur died of. It was a bad vapor that rose and killed him. But it’s likely sweating sickness, which we don’t really know for sure what it is anymore because we don’t have that anymore. It’s a very interesting thing. He also contracted malaria, which was called tertian fevers. Or at least the type he had. And smallpox.
So very early in his life, he watched his father, his brother die, and he got two very severe ailments. So that really sent him and he really become very hypochondriac, hypochondriacal? I don’t know. He became a hypochondriac and obsessed with medicine, and ailments, and illness. So yeah, he did move. If someone was sick, he would move. You were not allowed to come to court if you were ill. He was very strict on that.
So through that, he was really involved in the medical stuff. Which we’ve already talked about. He founded the Royal College of Physicians, he united the barber surgeons and the regular surgeons in 1540, which we have that painting from. He was an apothecary, had his own apothecary cabinet. He had his own steel. He was just very involved with it.
I really think that involvement is the reason so many of his physicians had medical texts published and were the firsts of their kind. Thomas’s book, Certaine Workes of Chirurgie, is the first English published book on surgery. It contains gunshot wounds treatments. Gunshot was very new at this point, especially in England. William Bullein is the first English person to write about sweating sickness. All of his staff did all these things, and I think a lot of it is due to Henry’s obsession with medicine and ailments and trying to treat them.
Heather:
And yet, he let himself get so out of shape and really… How do you personally understand that? Have you ever thought about that? Or what do you think about that?
Seamus:
Well, I think, sp he was pretty in shape very early. I mean, he was praised for how athletic he was, and beautiful and fantastic. But later in life he really let himself go. And a lot of that, I think, is due to his mental state. I mean, he had a lot of pressure. Obviously, he was king of a country. But he didn’t have an heir. He didn’t… there’s all these things.
And I know that. Before we had my son, I was asked daily, “So when are you having kids?” I can’t imagine if I was trying to get an heir for a kingdom. The pressure would be outstanding. So all these things plus his jousting accident where he was left unconscious. And by that point, he was kinda starting to put on weight. He was in his later 30’s. I think just, he crumbled under the pressure. I think he let himself eat too much, and he became… he was very into eating and the physical pleasures where he was less so earlier.
I mean, he was very into pleasure and playing. He wasn’t very good at the beginning there, as far as governing a country. But he really, he became less spiritual and more physical later in his life. I think that really… he became less focused on those things and kinda just let go. I think a lot of it has to do with his mental state. And then you can see that change through his reign.
Heather:
Sure. So can you talk to me a little bit, I’m totally going out of the order. All my questions are… So the speed of the injury. So that takes me, if you can talk the me a little bit about…
We know he had that jousting accident. And I’m so interested in that jousting accident, ’cause there’s so many different reports. Like you talked about that he was left unconscious. Yet, some sources don’t say that. There’s all this mystery around this jousting accident. So what, from your study, from what you found, tell me a little bit about some of his main injuries. Then if you can kinda touch on the 1536 one, that’d be great.
Seamus:
Okay, yeah. So he actually, so he had two jousting accidents. And I’ve seen them confused in some talks about. In his first jousting accident, he just forgot to put his visor down and he got nicked in the brow. No real serious injury. Probably knocked him about a bit. But he wasn’t left unconscious from that one and I don’t think he was even removed from his horse.
So you hear a lot about his jousting accident, and I’ve seen that one referenced as the jousting accident, which changed Henry. Which, that was not the one where he was left unconscious. That was the first jousting accident.
He also wrenched his ankle pretty bad playing tennis. And I believe that there was a couple times where he did that. But you can see, when you look back at the letters, there’s talk of him sitting out from dancing and being very grumpy about it.
And the thought is that you can see a shift in the shoe wear of the time period to slippers, because he had a hurt ankle and so he, instead of wearing the regular shoes, he was wearing slippers. That became very fashionable, and they kinda followed the king in wearing black velvet slippers. Which was likely due to a wrenched ankle.
He also almost drowned trying to pole vault over a creek or a pond. Which I didn’t include in my book because I didn’t really find any treatments for–
Heather:
Almost drowning?
Seamus:
Almost drowning, right. So I didn’t really think that was one that would probably have been treated. But it was one of the accidents he had.
Then there was his big jousting accident. And I think a lot of the confusion comes from… he probably was quickly brought into a tent and just his medical staff was inside. So we don’t have records of what they did. And so you’re looking at people who were on the outside, and just see him rushed into a tent to be tended to. There was… was he left unconscious for two hours? I guess we probably don’t know for sure.
But more of the sources say that he was unconscious than not, I think. So I think it was probably likely he was unconscious for a while. And that is one of the things that people really say, that’s what changed Henry. This head injury. I think it was a combination of things. It definitely didn’t help. There were definitely other thing that could lead to a personality change in a person.
For instance, one of the treatments that I cover in my book for swollen legs is… contains three different types of lead. So you have this person who has …on their leg and you’re smearing a plaster of lead onto them. The lead poisoning, mood changes, abnormal sperm, joint pain, all these things are symptoms of lead poison. You’re actually rubbing it into someone’s leg, and open wounds. That’s one of the things that isn’t really looked at.
On top of that, the wound that he got in that second joust, when the horse fell on him and he hurt his leg. It never healed and he got that fistula. The constant pain from that… So, I work in a pharmacy in real life. You see people who are in chronic pain all the time. You can tell a difference when they’ve been treated and are getting better and their mood. I mean, their mood is completely different and they’re a completely different person.
So that’s really another thing that I think is overlooked – is the chronic pain that Henry was in. So that joust not only affected him possibly mentally, but affected him through the chronic pain affecting his personality.
Heather:
Sure. Okay, and yeah. Can you tell me about… well, his legs, we kinda talked about, the sources and just kind of what you were able to find and what you really used as you put together your book?
Seamus:
So I used three types of sources. I used the letters and the firsthand accounts to really set the stage of what was being said about Henry at the time. Then I used medical texts written by Henry’s physicians. Then some modern medical sources to kind of tie it all together. For example, the Center for Disease Control to kind of give us an idea of what the diseases were.
So for the letters and papers database, which was a good portion of the sources I used for firsthand accounts. There were some other ones. Wolsey’s gentleman usher. That’s what he was. He was a gentleman usher, wrote an account, and so that was included.
But most of them were the letters and papers database, which is fantastic. It was really interesting, because these are words written by people who have actually interacted with Henry, or words of Henry himself. So it was really interesting.
As well as, like I said, my grandmother was really into genealogy. When she passed away a couple years ago, I got 13 boxes of genealogy things.
Heather:
Oh, wow.
Seamus:
Yeah and included in it was a diary written by my great-great grandma of the entire first year of my great-grandma’s life. When she started wearing stockings, what she ate, who came to visit. It was just so interesting to really get this window into that time period.
Reading the letters and papers database is exactly like that. I mean, a lot of the things are, “I went to visit this person,” or, “This person is not gonna be able to visit you because their ulcers or their gout is acting up.” And a lot of it is just really everyday things which is super interesting.
I have to say, it was a little like I was doing something bad by reading someone else’s mail. You know what I mean? It was like, these are personal letters that someone wrote to someone else, and here I am reading through them. So that was the majority of the sources I used for figuring out what was going on around Henry.
The second type of sources were the medical texts. So it includes three different texts. Doctor Butts’ Diary or Henry’s Prescription Book, which we already talked about, which was written by four of his physicians. Then, Thomas Gale’s book, Certaine Workes of Chirurgerie. And then William Bullein’s Bulwark of Defence, which actually consists of four different books within it. A book on symbols, and then a conversation between him and another medical person. But his book contains the first published treatments for sweating sickness. He was his nurse surgeon.
So all three of these texts were actually written by people who treated Henry. So we don’t have the medical records for Henry. And a lot of people believe that’s for their… save themselves. Some of them went wrong. It could be used against them if they killed the king. So it was very common in history for the medical staff of kings and queens to not include what they did to treat them. But by looking at the texts that we have, written by Henry’s physicians, these are what they recommended for these treatments. And this is what Henry had. You can kind of put it together.
Then finally, I used sources like the CDC to kind of give an idea of what the ailments were. Malaria is not an issue in England like it was during the Tudor period. It’s not an issue at all in the States. You hear, “Oh, I need to get this medication so I don’t get malaria when I go to Africa or whatever.” We don’t really understand what it is. Same with smallpox. Smallpox is extinct. We’ve eradicated it. So a lot of people don’t have, really, an idea of what smallpox was. So I wanted to use those modern sources to give us an idea of what it is, exactly, that they were dealing with.
As well as some modern sources that gave us an idea of what the treatment ingredients were for. So in some cases, I talked about the lead and what the symptoms for what lead poisoning was to show that some of these treatments actually could’ve done more harm than they did good. So these modern sources kind of tied it together, I think, and really made it into a beginning to end. You know, what was said about him, what was actually done in the Tudor period, and then what we know modernly, looking back at those treatments.
Heather:
Right. I think it’s really interesting. Your book is great. And it’s really easy to read, your book, too. ‘Cause I’m not a–
Seamus:
Good, I’m glad.
Heather:
Yeah. It was great.
Seamus:
But so, it actually was really kind of… It took a lot of editing and me going back and going, “Okay, would I have known this if I didn’t study it? No, I probably should explain that.” And a lot of… ’cause I just start talking, and then I’m like, “Oh wait a minute, the average person doesn’t know that.” So I’m glad that it was easy to read and for someone who doesn’t know about that time period and medical treatments in that time period.
Heather:
Yeah, no, for sure. The main thing we kinda just touched on while we talked about his legs. What do you think… Were the legs his predominant… Was that the main issue that bothered him in the end of his life, were his legs?
Seamus:
Yeah. I mean, that was one of the main things. So, he was very proud of his legs. And it was talked about in court. He wore really tight garters that are likely what caused his swelling and his varicose veins and which started his ulcers. So, not only did he have those issues earlier, as he got older, they got worse, and he got ulcers on both legs. Then he then had the injury which caused the fistula that never healed. There’s talk of… you can smell the king coming. I mean, just a rotting wound on your leg that never heals.
So, it was a big part of his health issues, were his legs. The thing he was most proud of, later in life, was the thing that held him back and really hurt him and caused him the most pain.
Heather:
How would you treat that today? How would you treat an ulcer like his on his leg? What would you do?
Seamus:
Well, so… antibiotics.
Heather:
Okay, yeah. All right, so–
Seamus:
I mean, that was the big thing. Is what they would do, they would keep reopening it. It was very common in that time period to use a hot iron to reopen the wound and let it drain. Which is good and fine, and we would do that now without a hot iron. But with a tubing and gauze and letting the infection drain out. You know, we would’ve used… we’d use antibiotics, as well. And that’s something that they didn’t have, obviously.
So I mean, they did the best they could at the time with what they had. They were draining it and he would get better when it was drained. Because it would seal off. And the infection would flare up again. So they did the best they had with what they had.
Antibiotics would’ve saved him. Yeah. I mean, it was with him until he died. It was a real chronic… I can’t imagine having an infected wound for that long.
Heather:
That would be horrible. So none of these herbs that we talk about… Do any of them have any kind of antibiotic properties? Or not…the kind that he would’ve needed though.
Seamus:
I didn’t see any that were used by his… I mean, we know that there are some that have antibiotic properties. But none that stuck out that this was… One of the treatments that I covered was a wound flush. Not a lot of the stuff in it really has much to actually help. So you’re really just kind of flushing dirty plant water through a wound, you know. So–
Heather:
All right. Well, that’s a great topic. So on the note, can you tell me a little bit about your book? ‘Cause we’re touching on it, and where can people learn more about you and where can they buy your book? Tell us about that.
Seamus:
Book?
Heather:
Yeah, plug yourself.
Seamus:
This one right here?
Heather:
Yeah.
Seamus:
Yeah, right. So, my book is available on Amazon. It’s available on Kindle and paperback. I have a Facebook author page, if you wanna keep up on all the other things I do. I try and post periodically about random treatments that I come across. Really interesting, weird things. It’s under Seamus O’Caellaigh, so if you Amazon search “pustules,” I’m the first thing the comes up. Right? I know.
Heather:
You’ve made it. You’ve made it.
Seamus:
Yeah, I know. I’m just like, “I don’t even care anymore.” So you can also… Made Global, which is the publisher, has a little blurb about me. And you can click on my book from there, and it’ll take you directly to my Amazon page that has the book there. So currently, those are where it’s available. Just through Amazon.
Heather:
It has pictures. It’s illustrated. Well, it’s not… it has photographs.
Seamus:
So Vocalize Photography worked with me. They did a fantastic job. They’re a local photographer here on the Oregon coast. And basically what I did was I took all of my ingredients in a big pile and I threw it on a table and was like, “Take a picture with me.” And so they really worked with me, taking tons and tons of photos with my stuff to try and make it visually pleasing. ‘Cause so often, science and specifically apothecary, when you’re recreating that time period, are overlooked.
You know, people look at the stained glass windows. They look at the paintings, the clothing, these visual things. And apothecary is, more often than not, a dusty old book, you know? And it’s not as visually pleasing. So what I wanted to do was make this science and this medical thing visually pleasing for people.
So even if it’s not necessarily your favorite topic, it’s still really interesting and visually stimulating for the eyes.
Heather:
Yeah. That’s great. So, cool. Is there anything you wanna add that I didn’t ask you about?
Seamus:
Smallpox, we didn’t talk about smallpox.
Heather:
Oh, smallpox. How could we forget about smallpox? Tell me about smallpox.
Seamus:
So, four of the treatments that are in my book are actually for smallpox. One of the interesting things I found about smallpox, obviously, is we don’t have to worry about smallpox now. It’s been eradicated. But if you look at the survival rate, 30 percent of people passed away with smallpox on average.
So you look at your family and if there was an outbreak in your town, you’re saying goodbye to a third of the people in your family. Like, I can’t even imagine how horrible that is.
And so, smallpox is really interesting to me because it’s not something we have to worry about now and it was such a big deal. We know that smallpox caused fevers and rashes and the pustules. The trademark of smallpox, where it gets its name. So in my book, I included four treatments for it. One for the pustules themselves, one for the scabs that you get after your pustules fall off. Exciting. Then you had a fever, you have trouble sleeping when you have fever often. So I included a fever treatment plus a sleeping aid.
But the pustules treatment was really my favorite, because in my book, I actually recreated pustules on my arm so I could be putting treatment on them. So I got a… I am very glad I didn’t have real pustules to put it on. But it was really fun to use this treatment. It was made with sulfur and oil of bay and vinegar, in this plaster. And so it really smells horrible, like rotting eggs. So that must mean it works really well. But it just was very interesting to treat this disease that we don’t have anymore in such a visual, awesome way. So, yeah, smallpox are cool.
Heather:
Smallpox are cool. We should make shirts. Cool…Seamus. So that makes me wonder. I mean, people understood contagion. There wasn’t like germ theory, obviously, but people with the bad air. Can you tell me a little bit about what people understood about–
Seamus:
Right. That’s where the idea of the plague doctor masks with the beak that was filled with herbs, was to filter that bad air. So they had the knowledge to know that there were things in the air that would cause illness. They didn’t know it was germs. But you knew that if you were around someone who was sick, you could get it. So they had that idea of things being contagious, and they just didn’t have as much knowledge as we do.
Heather:
Have you ever read, there’s a book I read about 10 years ago about the last outbreak of the plague in England. It was in like the 1650’s or something. But there was this village that sealed themselves off for two years while the plague was–
Seamus:
No.
Heather:
Oh, it’s a really interesting book. It’s like the diaries of these people. ‘Cause they got it in their town, and they didn’t wanna spread it. So they sealed themselves off. And every week, people would come and deliver food in a big pit that they made and deliver clothing and all this stuff that they needed and raise a flag when it was delivered. And then people from the town would come down and get it, and they would exchange letters and that kinda stuff like that. But they did it until the last person either died or was better.
Seamus:
They got better? Right.
Heather:
Yeah, and it was a really interesting–
Seamus:
That’s really interesting.
Heather:
Yeah. It was a really interesting book. Yeah. I mean, it’s a later time period. 1680’s or something like that. It just made me think, because they knew that there was contagion, but how did it spread kinda thing. Yeah.
Seamus:
Right, yeah. They knew a lot of it was in the air. You see things where they would burn bedding and that contagion as well. You knew that some of them were physical contact. And so you would get rid of their bedding and you would get rid of the things that they touched to try and keep their clothing. Burn their clothing, everything, to try and keep that from spreading. So they had some knowledge of it, they just didn’t know if it was bacteria or viruses or parasites.
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