Quackery, Its evils traced to ignorance and Credulity

===9 Spring 1386==========

When I woke for a second time that night to the sound of Curry coughing in the next room, I slipped out of bed and padded barefoot into his room in my pajamas. He sounded much worse than I’d expected for it only being a few hours, and his lungs had taken on a wheeze since we went to bed. He was dozing fitfully, and stirred a little when I pressed my hand to his forehead and tried to decide whether what I felt was his usual intense body heat, or actual fever. “Fuzzy,” he mumbled in a surprisingly little-boyish voice, when I smoothed the hair away from his face. “I’m cold.”

I got into the chest at the foot of his bed and took out another quilt, then spread that over him, tucking it in close to him to help him better hang on to the warmth. “I’ll stir up the fire,” I said, then turned and got the poker so I could see whether there were any coals still burning. Curry must have been chilly even before bed, since even though it hadn’t been that cold today, he’d banked the fire for lasting warmth instead of letting it burn hot and then die out overnight. I stirred the embers and put a new piece of wood on them, then replaced the fireplace screen.

“Poor Mag,” I said, noting how painful-sounding his barking cough was when I returned to his side. “Do you think you can sit up? Maybe it’ll ease that coughing while I get you fixed up.”

He shook his head no, still shivering, not opening his eyes. “Please not yet. Everything hurts. Even my eyes.”

I frowned, trying to recall if I had ever been so sick my eyes hurt, and failing to come up with anything. “All right. I’m going to go get some things to make you more comfortable. Try to drowse till then.”

Downstairs in the pantry I set my lamp down on a shelf and found an empty basket to carry what I wanted upstairs, then began taking inventory of Nan’s stock with an eye for anything I could recall her having used at other times when people were sick. She wouldn’t be back for almost two weeks, so there was no asking her advice on any of it.

Nan kept always a supply of homemade throat lozenges, but seeing chiefly ingredients and relatively few of the other finished restoratives she customarily administered, I concluded the answer must be that such articles didn’t store well and therefore couldn’t be made in advance and kept on hand. It would be up to me, then, to work out what to do for his barking cough.

I found, though, a small bottle of laudanum and a bottle of chokecherry cordial that Nan often used to mask the taste of other ingredients. These went into the basket, along with some of the lozenges in case his throat did hurt.

Next to Nan’s medicines there was a shelf with several books and a small wooden box which held Nan’s various family receipts all inscribed on cards. I flipped through the cards but didn’t see anything that looked very likely to help, and then looked at the books. One of them, leatherbound and embossed with Efficacious Preparations set in fancy scrolled type, seemed promising. These words on the spine turned out to be all that would fit from the extremely long full title that left no doubt concerning the book’s purpose: Efficacious Preparations for Healthful Remedies for Use in Managing Sickrooms for Households of Any Size by someone named simply: Evermund.

I moved the lamp a little closer and opened the book up. It was far too thick for me to get through in one sitting, or probably even a week, so I flipped to the back to skim for anything likely in the index. The index was itself a long read, at over thirty pages, and when I found a section headed Fevers I quickly gave up trying to guess which of the listed fevers might be giving Curry his cough: Bilious, Bilious remittent, Catarrhal, Exanthematous were all listed and I had no idea what any of those meant. I turned the page and found entries for all manner of other intermittently-recognizable complaints: Fungous Growths, Furunculus, Gall Stones, Gangrene, Gleet, and Globus Hystericus all appeared on the next page after Fevers. Of those I had heard of only gall stones and gangrene. I tried Cough next, and found listings for Catarrhal, Dry, Loose, Hectic, and Hooping, which was unhelpful in that this listing seemed to presume its reader was meant already to know that there were different types of cough, which I had not, and what all of them were called by.

For Lungs there was no listing at all, though I observed an entry for something called Liver Derangement, what manner of affliction I could not imagine.

I turned to the front of the book, where I found a listing of contents something easier to grasp, and a chapter listing of which the first was Introductory value of Health & desire to Improve it—which annoyed me in its obviousness, and the second was Quackery, Its evils traced to ignorance and Credulity, to be opposed by Sound knowledge. The third was inauspiciously titled The inherent Tendency of man to Speculate on the Phenomena of disease—which fostered in me a premature resentment at the probable denouncement of this tendency, when what alternative was this stupid book even furnishing me to replace speculation with something more sound!

By now thoroughly irritated, I almost rejected the book as a useless philosophical treatise for those already amply informed on the nature and badness of disease and stuck it back on the shelf—except that when I turned one more page I saw the fourth chapter was The Functioning of the Body common to All bipedal Humanoids. The word bipedal I didn’t know but humanoids sounded promising enough. The next chapter I thought must be getting closer to what I wanted—Digestion, its office to Supply Waste of tissues. I skipped the next few pages which listed chapters answering for all different parts of the body, made note of a chapter entitled Contagion & Infection-terms Defined, and finally began to run into some chapters listing different categories of disease.

But I gave up on the Evermund when in skimming the chapter on Respiratory illnesses Defined & enumerated for the Layperson, I found a paragraph claiming that for a patient’s hair to be worn too long was a costly sap to their vitality and general vigor and therefore if someone malingered too chronically then vanity must be eschewed and their hair clipped short. As medical notions went this sounded both untrue and old fashioned. Turning to the title page I observed that the book had been published over a hundred years ago, and shoved the fat tome back on the shelf in disgust, wondering why Nan even kept it.

A thinner book titled simply Mothers’ Remedies—and I checked this time, to confirm it wasn’t an antique and therefore likely to give stupid advice—began straight away with a short preface, then a detailed table of contents with headings more descriptive than flowery, and then commenced with a first section simply titled DIAGNOSIS, which listed ailments in alphabetical order, indicating what each meant and how one might identify it, along with a reference to more detailed information further along in the text.

Within only a few minutes I had tentatively identified several possible things that might be the matter with Curry, and then compared them all and discarded diphtheria, which was contagious and began with chills like he had, but didn’t mention any cough—Damavarian measles, which was quick to set in and involved a cough and achiness, except the patient was also likely to turn very red, which he hadn’t—and all the different poxes, which seemed mostly to be accompanied by vomiting. The most likely candidate seemed to be something called influenza—onset usually sudden, the text said, with a chill and all the symptoms of active fever: headache, bone-ache, general weakness and all-over body aches. Patient feels miserable and sick all over.

I thought of Curry's complaint that even his eyes hurt, and despite not recognizing the name, consulted its more detailed entry and determined that influenza was simply another name for the grippe, and that apparently it was sometimes shortened to only flu, which felt like an offensively familiar name for it considering how poorly Curry had become in so few hours. I had never myself had the grippe, or heard a personal accounting of anyone who did, but it sounded right—chill, fever, painful eyes and aches, accompanied by great prostration, which described his unwillingness to sit up better than any words I could have come up with. The entry for influenza concluded alarmingly: Some persons never fully regain their health, especially if they are careless during the attack, and almost any disease like bronchitis, kidney disease, pleurisy, pneumonia, etc., may follow. Recall for expired patients frequently made difficult or impossible due to effect of delirious episodes on spiritual resilience.

Concerning how I might remedy it—influenza seemed much the same as anything Nan might have done for the relatively minor fevers I usually got once or twice a year: I must keep him warm while he had the chills, but watch him to be sure he didn’t get too feverish, in which case the fever must be brought down with willow tea and by sponging him with cool water. If I could get him to sit up long enough, the patient should drink warm, sweet, soothing beverages, a number of preparations for which were listed in the text, and I should dose him every hour or two with a cough remedy meant to comfort and help him bring up phlegm if there was any of the pneumonia type of effect.

The book stressed also that I must clean my hands with soap after touching him, to avoid taking ill myself, for one could scarcely perform as caretaker if sick with influenza oneself.

I had no idea how one got sick through their hands, since the very notion sounded mad, but recalling how I had earlier touched his forehead, I stopped then and washed my hands in the kitchen sink using the Mothers’ Remedies prescribed method.

I restarted the kitchen fire and began gathering up the ingredients I needed to prepare Cough Remedy No. 9: For Adults (not for children): laudanum, anise, peppermint oil, honey, molasses, lemon, and vinegar. It had simple instructions, and could be prepared and used immediately instead of some of the other receipts which called for various things to be mixed up in a crock and let to stand for a week while the ingredients mingled. I had never heard of anise, and looked it up in the index, trying to decide if it were simply another familiar article given an unfamiliar name, but it didn’t appear there and if Nan had any in the pantry then it wasn’t labeled. But the other things we did have, and the instructions sounded easy: Combine in a kettle and let this come to a little more than a boil. Take a spoonful as often as necessary.