Return to First Page----ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY, Volume 21 (Summer 1962), p. 133
An intelligent planter who had read and absorbed several medical handbooks and incorporated with that knowledge his own common sense and empirical outlook could be expected to have at least as much success as many self-styled doctors or poorly trained ones. From the baking of one's own bread to the practice of one's own medicine, the rural individual of the nineteenth century supplied his needs and solved his problems in an essentially different fashion from that of the participants in today's interdependent socio-economic framework.
A manuscript discovered in southwest Arkansas several years ago provides a good reflection of this nineteenth-century rural self-sufficiency through hundreds of specific illustrations which it contains. Filed away in an old bookcase in the home of Mrs. Carrie Carrigan in Ozan (Hempstead County), Arkansas, this small hard-backed composition book had been forgotten and unopened for many years. It seems that this two-hundred-page handwritten compilation of medical remedies, cooking recipes and other practical information was brought to Arkansas from North Carolina in the 1850's by Alfred H. Carrigan and his young bride, Mary E. Moore, along with a number of other books from the Moore family library. Containing a wealth of information arranged topically, in alphabetical order, and even partially indexed, the little manual must have been exceedingly helpful to that young couple settling in a place relatively distant from their former homes. In fact, for a time it was probably the most useful reference book in their entire library (1).
- Approximately the first quarter of the manuscript consists of remedies for the diseases and ailments of man----asthma, bilious fever, bruises, burns, chills and fevers, colds, deafness and earache, hydrophobia, hiccups, itch, nettle rash, poisoning, rheumatism, ringworm, sore throat, toothache, warts, whooping cough, and worms---to list only a few (2). ____________________________
- 1. The manuscript is presently in the author's possession.
- 2. Manuscript, pp. 3-39.
Words
Study Questions
Related Sites