Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus / Happy St David's Day

In honour of St David's Day, the national day of Wales, today we focus on one of the Library's Welsh holdings.

One of the fascinations of archive material in particular is the way that it makes things specific: takes large, overarching topics and presents them in terms of particular instances, anchored to real people and real places. Today, of course, we will be looking at an item that takes us to Wales: to Rhagatt Hall in the valley of the River Dee / Afon Dyfrdwy, just downstream of the small town of Corwen.

Over the years this blog has featured extensive coverage of the Library's seventeenth century recipe books. Those are, however, simply the tip of the iceberg: manuscript recipe books continued to be compiled throughout the eighteenth century and on into the nineteenth, finally beginning to fade from common use in the second half of the century (although they are by no means extinct even now). Like the seventeenth-century volumes, these later examples mingle medical, culinary and household management instruction, in varying proportions according to the compilers' preoccupations. Their main point of difference from the earlier books is in their greater use of printed cuttings: as time passes we see people less willing to transcribe every recipe in longhand, when they can cut out something from a printed source and paste it into the recipe book, and some from this late period are composed almost entirely of cuttings.

Today's Welsh item is a recipe book from this late period. MS.8459 is a small volume containing some 130+ pages of medical recipes and other very assorted material, which was formerly owned by Jane Margaret Lloyd (1822-1912) of Rhagatt Hall, daughter of Edward Lloyd of Berth and Rhagatt, and Frances Madocks, daughter of John Edward Madocks of Fron Iw, Denbighshire. It is unclear whether she had the volume compiled or simply came into ownership of it at some stage. Within the volume are recipes for medicines, including homoeopathic ones, and some reports on experiences of their use; there are also recipes for the treatment of cats and dogs. Inserted items include prescriptions: one, dispensed by a chemist in Rhyl, is for a Mrs. Ffoulkes, probably Jane Lloyd herself, since in 1861 she married the Ven. Henry Powel Ffoulkes, archdeacon of Montgomery. There are various cuttings, including at least one in Welsh, the latter forming part of a collection of material on the use of violet leaves to treat cancer. Another cutting provides the lyrics to some popular songs, one of which - "The Lum Hat" - takes us into the realm of broad Scots dialect. Finally, taking us a very long way from Wales indeed, there is an invitation from the Officers and Council of the Japan Society to a Mr Herbert Tinker, asking him to an event also attended by His Excellency the Japanese Minister in the United Kingdom (this would be Count Hayashi Tadasu, who served as Minister from 1900 to 1905 and then as Ambassador for a further year). The presence of the last item, without any explanation, is evidence of the sheer unpredictability of archive material!

Archive material may be unpredictable: but one thing that one can predict, without much fear of contradiction, is that the Library's holdings are sufficiently various for pretty much any subject or part of the world to be represented somewhere in them. This one item is, of course, just a little sample of our Welsh material: the full list of hits on the words "Wales" and "Welsh" in the archives catalogue comes to over 8000. (Our sources guides on British Local History and Topographical Photographs provide a more manageable introduction.) On this day of all days, have a look through them.

Images:
1/ Daffodil, copyright Albert Bridge; from the Geograph website and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.
2/ Title page and start of contents, MS.8459.
3/ Material on treatment of cancer, MS.8459.
4/ Inserted prescription envelope, MS.8459.
5/ Valley of the River Dee, near Rhagatt Hall, copyright Jonathan Billinger; from the Geograph website and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

Guest Post: Exploring Health and Medicine in Early Modern Wales

Dr Alun Withey is an academic historian of early modern medicine, technology and the family. Here, he describes the inspiration and contexts of his new book, Physick and the Family: Health, Medicine and Care in Wales, 1600-1750, which includes research carried out in the Wellcome Library.

I never set out to be a medical historian. Whilst studying for my History BA, I was struggling to find a topic for my dissertation. I knew I wanted to do something connected to Wales and the seventeenth century, and settled upon the Civil Wars. I visited a local record office, and was introduced to a source that nobody had done much work on…a commonplace book. Amongst the notes and jottings were several medical remedies that looked interesting to the untrained eye. My curiosity was piqued and I decided to look into it further. Seven years, and a PhD later, I’m still looking!

Welsh medical history, at least in terms of the early modern period, has often been overlooked. In 1975, the editor of a collection of essays on the subject concluded that there were problems caused by a lack of medical sources for Wales. Such work that had been done tended to concentrate on the folkloric and magical elements of medicine in Wales, doubtless an important element of Welsh heritage, with the legendary ‘Physicians of Myddfai’ and their remedies garnering a lot of attention. The problem with ‘folklore’, however, is that it is a loaded term; Although magical remedies, symbolism and the ‘cunning man’ were important components, I felt that they also somehow contributed to a rural caricature, and made Wales seem remote, cut off from the wider world by its language and sometimes awkward terrain.

Physick and the Family, the first academic monograph on early modern Welsh medical history, set out to give what I see as the other side to the story of Welsh medicine. In doing so I not only wanted to write a new medical history of Wales, but also to use Wales as a test-bed to address much broader questions in medical history. In this sense, a new study wouldn’t just fill in gaps, but could provide a credible new investigation of the experience of sickness, health and care in the early modern period.

In many ways, the sources, dictated what questions could be addressed and answered. Contradicting the earlier view about Welsh sources, it soon became clear that there was actually a wealth of source material – much of it untapped. The book draws upon Welsh remedy collections, of which a good number survive – one especially rich example surviving in the Wellcome Library, known as the ‘Welsh Leech Book’ (MS.417). A study of the types and derivations of Welsh recipes proved insightful into the movement of medical knowledge both into, and within, early modern Wales, and not least in changing medical terminologies in the Welsh language. Diaries and letters yielded much useful information about sickness, the ways in which people described their symptoms, and also important factors such as the social rituals and conventions of sickness and the sufferer.

But the book also uses different types of source material, and it was often this that yielded the most interesting and surprising results. A detailed study of probate inventories, for example, looked at evidence for medical paraphernalia in the early modern home, but also for evidence, in shop inventories, of medicines for sale. From studies of shop inventories in three Welsh counties, it is clear that even small, remote village shops often sold a range of medical goods.

Other records such as those of the Old Poor Law were revealing in matters of care. Who, for example, cared for the sick, and what measures did the parish take to look after its own sick poor? The survival of some astonishingly detailed poor law records for one particular Welsh parish, allows for a detailed case study of the often sophisticated structures of care available to the early modern patient.

The book is intended to have a broad appeal, and not just to those inside the Welsh borders. It has been written to speak to anyone with an interest in medical history certainly, but also in social history more widely, since it is at heart a book about the experiences of ‘ordinary’ people. But as a regional history, it also encourages a more nuanced view of the early modern medical world, and one that takes into account the often important variations that could be caused by topography and geography, as well as language and literacy.

I said earlier that this was the first book of its kind; technically it is. But it is also worth mentioning a hidden gem in the Wellcome Library archive. In the 1920s an eminent physician, Dr David Fraser-Harris, was busy compiling his ‘History and Lore of Kymric Medicine’ – a richly detailed study of Welsh medical history and one in many ways far ahead of its time. Sadly, he died before it was completed and it now survives only in many boxes and unfinished drafts. In seeking to say something new about Welsh medicine we obviously shared a similar goal. I hope that he would have approved of my modest efforts some 90 years later.

Author: Alun Withey

'A Welsh Leech Book'

Of the thousands of manuscripts in the Wellcome Library, only one is written in Welsh. And as it's St David’s Day today – the patron saint of Wales, of course – we thought we would offer a few words on the manuscript.

Purchased for Henry Wellcome’s collection of manuscripts and books in 1907, and now catalogued as MS.417, Lhyfr o fedheginiaeth a physygwriaeth ('Book of remedies and medicine'), was written around 1600.

The language may be different, but the contents are similar to the Wellcome Library’s other medical manuscripts of the period. It is compiled from a host of sources, both local and classical in tradition. Treatments offered in the manuscript include cures for coughs, colic, ague and failing eyesight. Prescriptions include the use of herbs and ointments, but there are also directions for incantations and magical formulas. Indeed, MS.417 shares features with our collection of later 17th century – English - domestic remedy manuscripts.

The main difference between MS.417 and our domestic remedy manuscripts is that this is an item of a medical 'professional', hence the title of a 1924 published transcript of another version of this manuscript as A Welsh Leech-Book (‘Leech’ being an Old English word for Physician).

As indicated on our catalogue entry, authorship of the manuscript is disputed (it may have been the work of Sir Thomas Williams [1550?-1620?]). What MS.417 does offer up is some of its previous owners, the names of which are listed in 18th and 19th century hands. Given the bardic traditions of Wales, the name on this list of ‘Dewi Fardd’ – the poet and antiquary David Jones (1708?-1785) – is an intriguing presence.

The manuscript is deserving of more attention. A recent article in the journal Social History of Medicine argued that Wales in the Early Modern period, was part of a wider medical network than previous historians have accounted for. It would be interesting assess whether MS.417 helps to back up or dispute this claim.