Free If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home by Lucy Worsley

seventeenth-century bedchamber, women’s and ‘folk’ medicine fought a long-drawn-out rearguard action against the doctors. And some of their barmy-sounding techniques worked rather well, even iftheir ideas about illness were totally different to ours. For centuries sickness was conceived as God’s punishment. To pray was always one’s first line of defence; examining the patient’s actual body was sometimes thought frankly irrelevant. Consider, for example, this fourteenth-century doctor’s method of diagnosis:
take the herb cinquefoil and, while collecting it, say a paternoster on behalf of the patient. Then boil it in a new jar with some of the water which the patient is destined to drink; if the water be red in colour after this boiling, then the patient will die.
    Until about 1700, most physicians believed that the body was made up of the four ‘humours’, as described by the ancient Roman doctor Claudius Galen, and that illness occurred when one humour grew too powerful and overwhelmed the others. That’s why most medical treatments involved removing liquids of one kind or another from the body. Popular remedies included vomits (medicine to make you sick), purges (laxatives), glisters (enemas) and blood-letting. The idea was to restore balance between the humours. These were absolutely basic parts of medical practice, even performed in the bedchambers of healthy people. Treatment varied from patient to patient because each individual was thought to have been born with a predominant humour which also explained their character:

    Today we might assume that medicine based on such a flawed concept had little chance of success. Draining much-needed blood from a sick person’s veins, for example, seems likely to hinder rather than help their recovery.
    But the extraordinary thing is that bleeding did actually dogood. The enormous power of the placebo effect meant that a person placing him- or herself under medical treatment was given confidence, both in the healer and in the idea that they would get better. And very often people did just that.
    Tudor medicine contained many wacky and gruesome-sounding recipes, but some of them were really quite efficacious. To take one example: a Tudor wife who did not desire her husband could be ‘cured’ of her frigidity, we are told, if her husband rubbed the ‘grease of a goat’ on her private parts. The intention was that something of the character of a goat – a very lusty animal – would be transferred to the woman. In practice, though, the lubrication of the grease might very well have stimulated the woman. So the medicine worked, if not for the reason that the Tudors thought.
    Everyone of rank at the Tudor court enjoyed using emetics, not least because their meaty diet led to constipation. Henry VIII (once again) excelled in this area. His Groom of the Stool, or most intimate servant, had the daily duty of informing the world on the condition of the king’s bowels. Enemas would be administered through a pig’s bladder filled with liquid, slowly trickled into his rear end down a tube. One night his doctors reported that a very successful enema had caused the king to wake and give his close stool a ‘very fair siege’. (Possibly this isn’t quite the image of spectacular bombardment that our modern understanding of the word ‘siege’ implies. ‘Sege’ was also the Middle English word for a turd.)
    Henry VIII set the pattern for people to make a regular habit of retreating to their bedchambers in order to be ‘physicked’ with enemas, baths and sweating treatments, all intended to get those humours back into balance. The Tudor and Stuart habit of retreating from the world for a few days of pampering sounds rather like a modern spa visit. But the intentions were serious, and the interventions sometimes quite extreme. Haemorrhoids, for example, could be cured – it was thought – by taking laxatives, and then ‘two days after the last purge apply 6 leeches