Southern Folk Medicine

by Phyllis D. Light

  In 1526, Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon led 600 Spanish colonists and their Northern African slaves to settle on a South Carolina bay, ninety-four years before the Pilgrims founded Plymouth (1620). Disease and hunger reduced the vitality, strength, and, ultimately, the number of Spanish, and provided an easy opportunity for their African slaves to revolt and flee into the surrounding land where they took up residence with local Native Americans, the first peoples of the New World. Disease ravaged the remaining Spanish colonists who couldn’t survive without slaves to help with hard labor. The colony soon disbanded and the survivors returned to Spain, leaving the runaway slaves to either die in the wilderness or be assimilated into Native American tribes. This pattern was to be repeated several times over the course of colonization: Europeans such as the Spanish arrived with their Northern African slaves, and the slaves ran off to join the Native Americans.

  St. Augustine in Florida represents the first permanent settlement in the New World. The fort of St. Augustine was built forty-two years before the English settled Jamestown and fifty-five years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. In 1565, Admiral Don Pedro Menendez de Aviles, and his men and slaves, took over and fortified an Indian village, claiming the land for Spain. Named for the patron saint of theologians and printers, and on whose birthday the Spanish fleet landed, the settlement represented an attempt to outflank the French who had established a colony on the St. Johns River and were threatening Spanish interests. But Menendez, one of Spain’s most brilliant generals, quickly rid the land of the French and claimed it for Spain. Luckily, a timely hurricane aided his endeavors by eliminating the French fleet.

  Fairly soon, Spain controlled most of what was to become the United States, as well as Central and South America and the Caribbean. Colonies and settlements were established in the future states of North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana, New Mexico, California, and Arizona. The results of these encounters for Native Americans were disastrous, as European diseases decimated their populations and wiped out whole villages.

  French colonization in the South was generally restricted to the Gulf area and along the Mississippi River. Like the Spanish, the French also brought slaves from western Africa, mostly from Senegal, to support their efforts at colonization in the New World. The city of Mobile, Alabama, the first planned city in the United States, with streets and boulevards, was designed by the French.

  We can see that by the early 1500s, the first interactions in the New World occurred between the Spanish, their Moorish slaves, and the Native Americans. Information exchange was already taking place, especially that relating to foods and healing knowledge.

  The European humoral system of medicine became integrated with Native American uses of plants rather quickly, due to survival issues. For this reason, Southern Folk Medicine has much in common with the post-Columbian folk medicines of Mexico, parts of Central and South America, and especially the Caribbean. We share the same origins. Adding the layer of Irish folk medicine really increases the similarities between Caribbean Folk Medicine and Southern Folk Medicine.

  De Soto and His Legacy

  In 1538, Hernando de Soto arrived in Cuba with his wife, several priests, a few slaves, and a large entourage. For the next year, as governor of Cuba, de Soto finalized his preparations for the exploration of the American continent. With a mission from the King of Spain to find a route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, de Soto began recruiting men and preparing supplies for an extended exploration. De Soto’s success in Peru in 1532, with Pizarro, had earned him a reputation as a hero of conquest in Spain. For this reason, many men were willing to join the potentially profitable exploration and conquest of the new lands.

  Expecting to find gold, silver, and precious stones to compensate their travels, the band of more than 600 soldiers were very disappointed and surprised to find the natives of North America did not hold these objects to be valuable, as the Incas did. Nor were the Native Americans as docile as expected; the Spanish found no submission of them as they had the Incas. Even the Native women would take up bow and arrow when the Native men fell to de Soto’s rampages.

  De Soto chose to follow the same ill-fated route through Florida as a previous explorer, Narvaez, who also met the Apalachee tribe while searching for gold and the ever-elusive shortcut to China. According to the journal of the Gentleman of Elvas, a Portuguese member of the de Soto expedition and author of The De Soto Chronicles, “As soon as they reached Cale, the governor ordered all the maize which was ripe in the field to be taken, which was enough for three months. When they were gathering this, the Indians killed three Christians, and one of two Indians who were captured told the governor that seven days’ journey farther on was a very large province with maize in abundance, called Apalache.” De Soto set off for this land, wreaking havoc and carnage along the way and taking Indian slaves to ground the maize with mortar and bake it into flat pieces on earthen vessels set onto the fire. De Soto continued his journey to Apalache looking for maize, gold, and other riches.

  The Gentleman of Elvas chronicles de Soto’s march up through Florida and Georgia, through the lower Carolinas, and back down through Tennessee, Alabama, and the Midwestern states. The chronicler did note of the Native diet: “their ordinary food is maize, in place of bread, and their viands are beans and calabashes.…Their drink is clear water, just as nature gives it to them, without the admixture of anything else. The meat and the fish they eat must be very well dressed and cooked, and the fruit very ripe. They will never eat it green or half-ripe and laugh at the Castilians for eating green fruit.”

  The De Soto Chronicles tell very little about the everyday lives of the natives. Rather, the book is focused upon the feats and campaigns of an army razing the land. One particular battle, however, the Battle of Mauvila, stands out from other battle descriptions due to the particular type of medicine the Spaniards used after a particularly bloody battle, one where all soldiers had some type of wound and many had five or ten. The chronicler writes that during the battle, all provisions, including the medicines, had been consumed by fire, leaving the surgeon with no medicines to treat so many wounded. All food, shelter, and the trappings of communion had also burned. The chronicler writes: “They made roofs from the arbors to fasten to the walls that were left standing. Others busied themselves in cutting open the dead Indians and taking the fat to use as ointment and oil in treating wounds.” Human fat was used in place of the olive oil normally the surgeon would have used to dress wounds but which had perished in the fire.

  The de Soto troop never experienced firsthand living with the natives as had Cabeza, a Spaniard who explored Texas, the West, and Mexico. Instead de Soto viewed the land as an adversary, one to be conquered and so too the very people who lived upon it. Many Spaniards died from lack of salt, and only in desperation did they try the Native remedy. The account from the chronicler: “Having passed some days without it [salt], they felt the lack of it greatly, and some whose constitutions required more than others died for the need of it in a most extraordinary manner.” A fever developed, followed by a terrible stench from the body, which lasted for several days until the Spaniard came strongly upon them and death followed. The chronicler writes that “their bellies were as green as grass from the breast down.”

  After several deaths, some of the remaining soldiers “made use of the remedy the Indians [slaves] prepared to save and help themselves in that necessity. This was that they burned a certain herb they knew about and made lye with the ashes. They dipped what they ate in it as if it were a sauce and with this they saved themselves from rotting away and dying, like the Spaniards.” Some high-ranking Spaniards refused the remedy, regarding it as “unbecoming to their rank,” and died for their stupidity and pride. More than sixty Spaniards died in the year of no salt. The salt famine ended when they discovered brackish water with blue sand. Recognizing this as saltpeter, they decided it could be made into powder for their weapons. After straining the blue sand thr
ough water, it was brought to a boil and converted into a yellowish salt. Several of the soldiers “ate it by itself in mouthfuls, as if it were sugar.” In a few days, these men died of dropsy (edema).

  I’ve often wondered if the lack of apparent and readily accessible salt which the Spanish found in the New World influenced the prominent role that salt plays in the foundation of Southern Folk Medicine. In Southern Folk Medicine, salt (sodium) is connected to the element of water.

  The De Soto Chronicles provides a wealth of information about the interactions of the Spanish and the Native Americans, including food and herb use. The Chronicles specifically mention oaks, walnuts, sweetgum, pines, corn, beans, prickly pears, squashes, saw palmetto, mulberries, sarsaparilla, sumac, wild olives, and various herbs and roots.

  De Soto died from fever and was buried in the Mississippi River. He explored parts of the Appalachian Mountains and, according to some historians, named them after the Apalachee Indian tribe of northern Florida. His explorations continued through the South and Midwest, and he is credited as being the first European to see the Mississippi River. De Soto’s brutality toward the Native populations is well-chronicled. Enough said.

  New World Plant Influences

  For the Europeans, finding new medicines required travel outside of Europe, and some Spanish physicians and botanists believed that the New World offered a unique supply. In 1569, Nicolas Monardes, a Spanish physician and botanist, published Medical Study of the Products Imported from our West Indian Possessions, which contained descriptions of seventy-five plants and their medicinal uses. Interestingly, the genus Monarda was named after him. His book included the first written therapeutic benefits of such common herbs as tobacco, which Monardes believed to be an antidote to poisons, and sassafras, which was believed could cure syphilis. Monardes also believed that tobacco was a panacea for most any health issue including head colds, stomach problems, wounds, old sores, women’s health issues, and cancer.

  In addition to the slew of physical ailments healed by tobacco, Monardes also recorded spiritual uses of the plant: “One of the marvels of this Herb, and that which does bring most admiration, is, the manner how the priests of the Indies did use of it.… ” Monardes also recorded the use of tobacco by the average person to improve energy, create relaxation, and calm weariness—and, as a recreational drug, “In like sort the rest of the Indians for their pastime, do take the smoke of the Tobacco, for to make them selves drunk withal, and to see the visions, and things that do represent to them, wherein they do delight.”

  The following passage illustrates an example how explorers, settlers, and slaves learned the use of local herbs from the Native populations. Monardes also writes, “The black people that have gone from these parts to the Indies, has taken the same manner and use of the Tobacco, that the Indians have, for when they see themselves weary, they take it at the nose, and mouth, and it does happen unto them, as unto our Indians, lying as though they were dead three or four hours: and after they do remain lightened, without any weariness, for to labor again.… ”

  While we might think of tobacco as being a purely North American herb, with over sixty species, some species of Nicotiana grew from Canada to the tip of South America. This is an herb of the Americas and from here spread to the rest of the world. Nicotiana tabacum is a tall, broad-leaf, attractive plant which Native Americans were already cultivating when Columbus arrived. Plant geneticists believe that the center of origin for the tobacco plant was the Andes, and that it later spread to all part of the Americas. Nicotiana rustica, or wild tobacco, is smaller, less showy, and has much larger amounts of the alkaloid nicotine. This plant was more often used in healing ceremonies, spiritual rituals, and as a poison. Native Americans partook of tobacco in pipes, as tea, in powder as snuff, and in cigars. All methods of application are still in use today. I’ve often wondered what ancient Native Americans would have thought about the way tobacco has been corrupted and misused.

  Monardes also wrote about the magic of sassafras. He believed sassafras was a gift from God for the treatment of venereal diseases, especially syphilis. It could also treat the many fevers of unknown origin and seasoning diseases that Spanish explorers and settlers often experienced in the New World. As Donald Beecher writes, “Monardes believed in the power of sassafras to the point where he carried a piece of the wood on his person to protect himself from the contagions and pestilences he encountered as a practicing doctor—for which singular virtue he praised God for this marvelous plant.” John Frampton translated Monardes’s work into English in 1577, with the title Joyful News Out of the New Found World.

  In addition to documentation of the uses of sassafras by Monardes, Jacques Cartier also documented its use in 1535. Brian A. Honen, MPH, writes “England was so desperate for this new valuable medicine that Sir Walter Raleigh helped establish during the late 1580s, ‘great woods of Sassafras’ were noted to be in the vicinity in 1585.” Because sassafras was believed to cure syphilis, by 1620, it became the first overharvested plant of the New World.

  The Old World, Europe, was so desperate for any new medicine that, according to Stefanie Gänger in her 2015 paper “World Trade in Medicinal Plants from Spanish America, 1717–1815,” “by the eighteenth century, ‘foreign’ plant-based remedies were passed on to the urban and rural poor [in Spain] by religious orders, private charity or, from the late eighteenth century, increasingly systematic medical relief programmes.” Fortunately, the Spanish were quite adept at documenting the Indigenous peoples of the New World as well as plants and animals found in the land.

  Spain wasn’t the only country adopting New World plants into their official pharmacopeias. English historians, botanists, and illustrators were also busy, though Spain had a head start. Virgil J. Vogel, in American Indian Medicine, writes that the “most celebrated plant remedy to reach the world by way of the Carolinas was the Indian pinkroot (Spigelia marilandica L.), a Cherokee remedy for worms, which was adopted into the London, Dublin, and Edinburg pharmacopeias.…” Pinkroot was considered safe for children if given with a mild laxative and was greatly in demand in Europe, which led to its overharvesting and is still considered endangered today.

  Other plants of the New World which became economically and medically important in Europe included American ginseng, sweetgum, sarsaparilla, cayenne, dogwood, Seneca snakeroot, pleurisy root, also known as butterfly weed, yucca, evening primrose, white oak, white pine, elderberry, raspberry, and cedar berries. Many of these new and intriguing plant-based medicines made their way from Europe to India, Africa, and China.

  As an aside, new foods also made their way from the New World to Europe. It is not the scope of this book to discuss New World foods in detail; however, it does bear a mention. Popular and important foods and spices from the New World include potatoes, sweet potatoes, peanuts, cayenne, pineapple, avocado, mango, papaya, allspice, cocoa, tomatoes, coca leaf, corn, beans, squashes, amaranth, quinoa, yacon, guarana, vanilla, and soursop. From the North American New World, Europe also received pecans, black walnuts, persimmons, blueberries and huckleberries, cranberries, prickly pears, sunflowers, pumpkins, strawberries, paw paws, American chestnuts, and maple syrup.

  It also bears mentioning that another plant of New World origin—cotton—later became the economic cornerstone of the Southern United States. Upland cotton or Gossypium hirsutism, native to Central America, Mexico, the Caribbean, and southern Florida became so economically important that it now comprises 90 percent of the cotton grown worldwide. A discussion of cotton would be a whole other book, but the demand for it played an important role in the culture of the South and my childhood.

  One last point to consider: Plants have been exchanged across the world since the beginning of trade among peoples. Plants from the New World scattered across Europe, India, and the Far East, while plants from these same areas found homes in the New World. Wherever people migrate, their plants tend to migrate with them. In addition, governments that subsidized exploration to
the New World also expected a return on their investment. Plants useful as medicine or food or as garden ornamentals became part of that investment return and were broadly traded.

  The Southern United States is one of the most diverse regions of the country. I’m fortunate to live in Alabama, which alone has more than 4,533 species of plants and ranks fifth in the nation for overall biodiversity, fourth in the nation for exceptional biodiversity, and number two in the nation for species extinction risk. Think of all the potential medicine that our ancestors accessed and that we are ignoring today! I do worry that climate change and the loss of habitat due to urbanization and deforestation will greatly increase the extinction of many species that are potential remedies and medicines. What if the cure for cancer was in the deep Alabama forests? How will we know unless we protect and investigate?

  Naturalists today bemoan the number of invasive plant species from Europe and Asia that have found new homes in this country such as privet, kudzu, camphor tree, tree of heaven, fence rose, wisteria, Japanese knotweed, mimosa, sweet autumn, and purple loosetrife. But this cuts both ways. While European privet was invading the South, black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) from the South was invading Britain and parts of Europe and Africa.

  A Very, Very Brief History of Humoral Medicine