Cooking the books!

Like many archives around the country, the team at Cheshire Archives have been working remotely from home during lockdown with no access to the original records. The role of archive staff has changed massively over the years and luckily there is plenty of digital engagement work and cataloguing improvements that we can do to occupy us from afar. However, the archives themselves are still at the heart of what we do.

No one could have envisaged this rather surreal and strange period of isolation, and even after the first week I found myself missing looking at and handling original archives. It’s the feel of archives and, dare I say it, the smell of them!

Amongst the archives you can’t help but have particular favourites, and I am certainly missing some of my ‘old friends’. Obviously all of the archives we have our special but there are some that you form a special attachment to or bond with; the quirky archives that are just plain weird and those that you are proud and excited to show off to the groups that come into the archives.

A number of years ago we hosted a ‘Cooking the Books - A culinary adventure through history’ event where we did a show and tell session focusing on some of the food related records in our collection. We looked at everything from recipes for quaking puddings and drunken loaves to remedies for the treatment of fiery noses and the plague! Many of the staff decided to try and recreate some of the recipes in the books. This proved to be interesting for some of the dishes where measurements and quantities aren’t always given. It was definitely a case of trial and experience. I do remember the very nice herb pie for lent though! You can find the recipe for this here.

We were quite taken by surprise with how popular the event was and it resulted in lots of publicity and even a radio interview that resulted in a whole show with folk ringing in about their remedies for ailments…

One such archive is Lady Stanley’s medical remedy and recipe book or DDX 361 if you want its official archive reference. It’s a small A5 size book bound in vellum and it definitely fits into the category of ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’. On the outside it’s a rather battered, worn and unpromising volume but when you open it you are taken on a wonderful journey through 17th Century plants, herbs and medicine.

Lady Elizabeth Stanley began the book around 1620. The volume begins in a very neat secretary hand, and as the book goes on we get different handwriting. Subsequent members of the family, maybe? I like to think that it was a treasured book that was passed down through generations... It was important enough for Lady Stanley herself to inscribe ‘the ever honoured and right worshipfull Mrs Elizabeth Stanley of Alderley oweth this booke. July 16th 1653.’

The book begins with medical remedies, and towards the end of the book you are in the more familiar territory of ‘eel pye’, cooking partridge, veal and mutton and pickling red cabbage:

It wasn't until the end of the 17th century that a more clinical and scientific approach to the treatment of ailments and sicknesses began. Prior to this it would have been local folk with a knowledge of the virtues of plants and medicinal properties. The gardens would have been not only the larder for the family but also their medicine cupboard. 

Probably the first thing that strikes you as you look through the remedies in Lady Stanley's book isthat they cover everyday ailments for which we would nowadays pop to the pharmacy: remedies for colds using masses of honey, cures for gout and tooth ache, for freckles, a remedy for stinking breath and "an excellent water for the face to cleare the skinn and to keep it from wrinckles".

Other remedies were attempts to tackle some of the more serious, killer diseases about at that time- "a good drink for the pestilence" "to destroy all poison and plague" and "Mrs Katherine Booth’s recept to out pitts in the face after ye smallpox". 

It's hard to think from our modern vantage point with so much medical science and knowledge behind us that people were fighting these diseases with the help of what they could grow in their gardens. 

Some of the ingredients, such as ‘the six spoonfulls of dragons water’ and ‘treacle of jeane’ used in the pestilence remedy, sound rather alien to us nowadays but would have been popular and accepted ingredients at the time. (What is treacle of jeane you ask? A bit of further research tells me it was a genoa treacle or syrup recipe, a popular family medicine of the times which was often used to remove infections from the body. I’m still working on dragon’s water!)

Like us, when they discovered rememdies that worked for them and proved to be beneficial they shared them amongst their local community e.g. ‘Mrs Fallow’s syrup for the cold’, ‘Mr Crewe’s receipt for wormes’ and the ‘Countess of Derbye’s dyett drinke’.  At the end of many of the remedies you will find the words ‘probatum est’ which means that it had been proven to work. Although looking at some of the ingredients you wonder how and what side effects they would have had!

Finally the book conveys perfectly the superstition of the times and some of the more fantastical remedies are ‘how to bring forth haires upon a bald man’s head’, ‘to know whither a woman be with child of a male or female’ and perhaps most worryingly ‘to know whither one shall live or dye’.

You can’t get much better than a book that tells you what folk were eating in the past, which plants and herbs were readily available, the state of medicine and health in the 17th century and lots and lots of wonderful social history!

Chester's historic health hero

Every week in April 2020 we have applauded the work being done by healthcare heroes and in the archives we have the records of celebrated local health hero Dr John Haygarth whose work in previous epidemics was not only far-reaching and pioneering, but also very close to the challenges and experiences of today.

The medical profession at the time of Dr Haygarth was in the early stages of understanding, learning to control and attempting to eradicate some of the most deadly infectious diseases which ravaged the population in the 18th century. His theory on fever control: isolation of the patient, good ventilation of hospital wards and thorough and systematic cleanliness and hygiene measures were ground-breaking.

Two early influences on his life were a brilliant surgeon, John Dawson who drilled into Haygarth the importance of keeping and making use of statistical data and William Cullen, a leading physician at Edinburgh with his teachings on fever.

Haygarth’s connection with Chester began in 1767 when he was appointed as a physician at the Infirmary and he was to work here for the next 30 years. Chester Infirmary was founded in 1755 for the treatment of the sick poor and you can still see registers of patients, their diseases and their outcomes in the Chester Infirmary collection at Cheshire Archives.

Throughout his time in Chester he worked on the prevention and control of infectious fevers. In 1774 he was appointed by the Assembly of Chester to conduct a survey of the health of the inhabitants of the city. He carried out detailed analysis on births and deaths in relation to living conditions. His conclusions were that the overall health of the city was good but there were high rates of mortality in some of the poorer suburbs where crowded and insanitary dwellings provided ideal grounds for disease to spread from person to person. He identified the places where people came into close contact through the congested narrow streets adjoining the city walls as particularly dangerous.

Haygarth wrote that 'the natural smallpox was so dreadfully fatal to the poor inhabitants of Chester as to produce a deep impression upon my mind, especially when I considered, that it was possible to prevent such destruction.'

He advocated innoculation on a large scale (this was controversial years before Jenner worked on vaccination) accompanied by 'rules of prevention'. Rules on control of fever included removing patients from their family home and isolating them in a specialist ward, utmost attention to cleanliness and washing of bedding and clothing and no mixing with fever patients.

As early as 1771 Haygarth had begun to make improvements that are recorded in hospital board minutes. Visiting was limited to nearest relations, warm baths were installed, and wooden partitions were replaced with removable curtains to separate the beds.

In 1784 he was instrumental in setting up the first specialist fever wards at the Infirmary. An entry from 15th June 1784 reads:

“Ordered that the north attic storey be immediately fitted up according to the physicians instructions for the acceptance of fever patients”

On 4th October 1791 "Ordered that the fever nurse be desired to keep in her own apartments in future and that every necessary she is in want of be brought to her”

Success in fever wards at Chester encouraged the formation of dedicated fever hospitals in Manchester, Liverpool and London. In his published statistical work 'Observations in the Population and diseases of Chester in the year 1774', the remarkable patient outcome data in the Infirmary registers and innovation in hospital planning we can easily recognise the advances that we have come to know as contact tracing, social distancing, 20 second handwashing and catch it, bin it, kill it!

Haygarth retired to Bath in 1798 and lived there until his death in 1827.

Explore Haygarth images in our flickr album, or discover John Haygarth's Medical World with University of Chester's history undergraduates story map