Spice: The History of a Temptation

by Jack Turner

  By the standards of medieval medicine Don Loysius got off rather lightly. One of the more enduring strains in traditional medicine to which spices were particularly well suited was the notion of cure by shock treatment. Galen himself was a great believer in jolting the patient out of his illness. For an attack of epilepsy he recommended a draught of gladiator’s blood; for hydrophobia he suggested throwing the patient in a pond. Prescriptions likewise often lay a heavy emphasis on the rare, costly, exotic and revolting. Galen’s The Healing Art, one of his most widely read works during the Middle Ages, gives a peasant’s remedy for headache, consisting of a poultice of earthworms and pepper, ground together, mixed in vinegar and held on one side of the head. The Syriac Book of Medicines advises a mix of pepper, myrrh and dog excrement for the treatment of jaundice. One thousand years later the naturalist Edward Topsell (1572–1625) advised a mixture of hedgehog and pepper for the colic: ‘Ten sprigs of Lawrel, seven grains of Pepper, and of Opopanax as big as a Pease, the Skin of the ribs of a Hedge-hog, dryed and beaten and cast three cups of Water and warmed, so being drunk of one that hath the Colick, and let rest, he shall be in perfect health.’

  Even the most respectable authorities were seldom free of this sort of thing, and even those who could afford better were willing to try the most disgusting remedies. Marcellus Empiricus, doctor to Theodosius the Elder (347–395), gave a remedy attributed to an old African woman that was ‘efficacious beyond human hope’, comprising ashes of burnt deer-horn, nine grains of white pepper, myrrh and an African snail pounded into the mix while still alive and then ground into a cup of vintage Falernian, the finest wine of the Romans. The potion, he suggests, should be drunk while facing east.

  From a vague belief in the effectiveness of a sharp shock it was but a short step to the doctrine of no gain without pain; the if-it-hurts-it’s-good-for-you school of thought, alive and well until very recent times. This impulse is the only explanation I can think of for the regularity with which spices were applied to the parts that apparently needed them the least, such as nose, anus and genitals. Juan Gil de Zamora prescribed pepper for various ailments of the anus, the idea being that a sufficient quantity of the spice would somehow burn off the affliction. In the Book of Secrets attributed to Albertus Magnus (c.1200–1280), pepper and powdered lynx are recommended for piles and ‘growing out of flesh around the buttocks’. Gout was commonly treated with the direct application of spices in the hope that their pricking, burning effect would drive out the disease.

  If such remedies did not heal they presumably distracted, and they were probably less uncomfortable or less harmful than various treatments intended for the brain, a part of the body seen as particularly prone to wet and cold humours. Juan Gil de Zamora prescribed pepper and cinnamon for epileptics, gout, madmen, rheumatics and vertigo – all of which he classed as originating from cold, wet diseases of the brain. Methods of getting the spices to the affected organ could be truly gruesome. Since the nose was viewed as the most direct route, spices were often simply thrust up the nostrils. The early Portuguese Crónica de D. Dinis, king from 1279 to 1325, tells the story of the unfortunate Uraca Vaz, one of the handmaidens of Queen Isabel, who from time to time suffered from what the Crónica describes vaguely as ‘very bad pains’, possibly epileptic fits. Whenever she had one of these attacks she was tied hand and foot – this being the only way of securing her – ‘and they flung ground pepper up her nose’. (To no avail. The unfortunate handmaid was only cured by the intervention of the saintly queen, who placed her hands on her head and body, and cured her by making the sign of the cross.)

  Remedies such as Uraca’s may have hurt, but most would not have done any lasting damage. Given the risks involved, however, the consistency with which spices were applied to the eyes is nothing less than astonishing. Pepper salves appear in Greek medical manuscripts of the fifth century, mixed with copper, saffron, opium, lead and calamine. Pedro Hispano, later Pope John XXI (c.1215–1277), author of one of the most widely consulted medical works of the Middle Ages, Universal Diets and Particular Diets, claimed that ‘pepper is good for dimmed eyes’. For ‘dimness of the eyes’ the early-eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon manuscript known as the Herbarium of Apuleius suggests, obscurely but alarmingly, a poultice made of ground celandine,* honey, pepper and wine, with the direction ‘to smear the eyes inwardly’. The thinking seems to have been that just as bleeding drew off ill humours from the blood, so provoking tears drained off the ill humours of the eye, drying and warming the wet and runny eye of superfluous fluid. More likely spices simply caused unnecessary damage. The accumulated authority of medical tradition overruled observation.

  But it was animals, being unable to express their feelings on the subject, who probably suffered the most. At the turn of the last century a traditional Malay remedy for an elephant having trouble with its vision was to rub pepper in the poor beast’s eyes. Juan Gil de Zamora recommends sprinkling pepper up a goshawk’s beak if it suffers from clouding of the eyes; another prescription called for cloves. As late as the seventeenth century, it was still customary for falconers to pepper their hawks after a day in the fields. The Elizabethan naturalist Edward Topsell suggests horses suffering from ‘bloud-shotten eyes’ can be treated with a poultice of ground cloves, rosewater, malmsey wine and fennel water rubbed in the eye.

  Given the extreme pain or even permanent damage that was likely to ensue, carrying off such hocus pocus required a certain chutzpah from the exponent, gullibility from the audience, or both. And indeed much of the act is best classed as performance art, relying heavily on a degree of mystification and bedazzlement in which, not least, the costliness and rarity of the spices were seen not so much as liabilities as assets, by both wealthy patient and practitioner: if it costs—more, it must be better. This was an instinct physicians were naturally keen to cultivate. John of Gaddesden, physician to England’s King Edward II (1284–1327), freely confessed his interest in getting a good fee, referring to secret remedies of his own that he divulged only when the price was right. Gilles Corbeil (1140–c.1220), physician to King Philip Augustus (1165–1223), unblushingly advised doctors to tailor fees and medicines alike to their patients’ financial health: if the patient was wealthy, ‘then the medical man should come down with a heavy hand’, prescribing only the rarest and most expensive spices.

  In the main, however, the public’s chief concern with quackery was not whether the spices worked but whether – that perennial bane of the spice trade – they had been adulterated. In seventh-century Spain Isidore of Seville knew traders who added shavings of silver to their pepper so as to increase the weight – a telling aside on relative values. Such frauds only grew with time, yet the profusion of laws against adulteration were regularly ignored, despite ferocious penalties. At Nuremberg, spicers convicted of falsifying their wares were liable to be buried alive. The Old French poet known as the Spicer of Troyes, author of the romance Contrefait de Renard, written from 1319 to 1322, freely admits the cynicism of his profession. Having once been destined for a career in the Church, he was expelled for bigamy, an experience that left him, somewhat unfairly, a lifelong misogynist. Though he clearly regarded his new profession as more honourable than any other, even the spicer admits his colleagues are prone to substitute cheap local ingredients for rare and expensive spices, lying through their teeth over the counter:

  ‘This comes from far across the sea,

  I had it sought at great expense,

  Since it grows not in this land.

  This one comes from Armenia,

  And this from Romania,

  That from Acre, and that from Nîmes …’.

  And the whole lot grows in his garden!

  Often the spicer and physician worked hand-in-glove to milk the patient. Chaucer’s ‘Doctour of Phisik’ had reached a mutually profitable arrangement with the apothecaries who supplied him with expensive spices, each filling the other’s pockets at the client’s expense:

  He had his a
pothecaries at the ready

  To send him drugs and electuaries,

  Each working to profit the other.

  It would be misleading, however, to suggest that such schemes and frauds were entirely lost on a credulous public. A well-deserved reputation for trickery did not endear either physician or spicer to their customers. In the thirteenth century the town council of Avignon had statutes forbidding collusion between spicers and doctors in the fraudulent prescription of expensive ingredients. Corruption was believed to come with the job – indeed it was almost part of the job description. In the late fifteenth century Don Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo, bishop of Zamora, defined the apothecary as the person who adulterates and falsifies the spices. In Piers Plowman, the character of Liar finds refuge with the Spicemongers, Tor he knew the tricks of their trade, and their merchandise too.’

  But that the spicer was the object of such contempt was precisely because he was regarded as indispensable – the force of the denunciations rested on scepticism not of the spices but of the spicer. The author of the poem known as the Simonie or ‘Poem on the Evil Times of Edward II’ berates ‘false fisiciens that helpen men to die’, convincing an anxious wife that her husband is as good as dead unless she can find half a pound to buy spices: ‘dear at the price of a leek, for all he achieves’. The poorer the victim, the more grievous the con.

  What was true of the table was equally true of medicine. The best-known medieval medicines, and the lion’s share of the spice, belonged to the rich. As with cuisine, the most popular and affordable medicinal spice was pepper: a budget anti-melancholic. Pepper features among the wares of a ‘poor herbalist’ described by the thirteenth-century wandering poet Rutebeuf, hawking his meagre wares outside the church door in a shabby, badly stitched cloak and serving a clientele presumably no better off than he was. The poor man’s theriac, according to Arnald de Vilanova, was garlic. By the twelfth century, the herb – spice class differential seems to have been something of a cliché. John of Salisbury (c.1110–1180) cites ‘an old proverb’ that obtained ‘among courtiers and physicians everywhere’:

  In return for words we use mountain herbs;

  For things of value, spices and drugs.

  A verse attributed to St Isidore – for even pharmacy has its poetry – nicely captures the intermingling of potency and exclusiveness that was such a large part of spices’ appeal:

  Aromas that Arabian altars and Indus breathe,

  That the waves of the Ionian sea have borne:

  Cinnamon, myrrh, Indian leaf and cassia,

  Balsam, incense, calamus, saffron of Anatolia:

  These are found in the spice-stores of great kings,

  And the house overflowing with riches.

  We poor people make do with the simple herbs of the fields,

  That the low valleys and high passes bear.

  The irony is that in terms of medical efficacy the poor were not much worse off, if at all, than the rich: the peasant was probably better served by his garlic and herbs than a monarch treated with costly theriacs of exotic spices and powdered gemstones. But in terms of their appeal, the point is irrelevant. Spices were an elite luxury, no more run-of-the-mill than Hollywood clinics for detox and botox – and this was, of course, a large part of the attraction. For being out of reach they were all the more to be coveted.

  Pox, Pestilence and Pomanders

  Take Storax Calamita, lreos, Mastike of eche two partes, Cloves, Maces, Nutmigs, Cinamon, Saffron, of eche one parte amber the fifth of one parte, muske the tenth of one parte, mingle all together and make a fumigation.

  And of these powders ye may make little balles of Pomanders, to beare about with you at all times.

  J. Gouerot, The Regiment of Life, 1606

  Having survived the terrible pestilence of 1603, when the pox carried off some 25,000 of his fellow Londoners, corpses rotted in the streets and those who could fled for their lives, John Donne (1572–1631) knew the terrors of the plague first-hand. Hunting around for an elegant conceit to please his new patron, Lucy, Countess of Bedford, he settled on a medical metaphor. She must have been delighted with his elegant promise:

  In recompense I would show future times

  What you were, and teach them to’urge towards such.

  Verse embalmes vertue; and Tombs, or Thrones of rimes,

  Preserve fraile transitory fame, as much

  As spice doth bodies from corrupt aires touch.

  A simile as medically well-founded as it was poetically elegant, this was just the sort of thing a countess and patron of poets liked to hear. For that spices protected bodies was as much an article of medical belief as the claim of immortality was a Jacobean poet’s convention.

  Like Donne’s patron Lucy, ‘corrupt air’ has retreated into the footnotes, but at the time it represented the medical orthodoxy, the key to the final and perhaps single most important aspect of spices’ medicinal reputation. Odours, airs and vapours occupied a central place in ancient and medieval medical thought, and continued to do so until the nineteenth century. Helpless to explain the agencies of infection, ignorant of the existence of microbes and bacilli, doctors looked to the invisible air around them to account for the apparently random and utterly terrifying outbreaks of disease that suddenly appeared and then disappeared with no apparent cause. A capitulary of Charlemagne writes of plagues provoked by an ‘imbalance of the air’. Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt speaks of a ‘devouring pestilence [that] hangs in the air’, and Dante writes of plague-racked Aegina, ‘when the air was so charged with corruption’. A medieval physician of Valencia, writing to his two sons in Toulouse in 1315, argued that bad air was still more harmful and infectious than corrupt food and drink. As fanciful as the belief may strike us – for while it is true that the vectors of disease are occasionally carried within the air, the air itself is harmless – it seemed to make a good deal of sense. In lieu of any visible proof of infection, blighting miasmas and gases, the baleful influence of ill winds and noisome exhalations from the earth stood in for pathogens and bacteria that would remain unseen and unknowable until the advent of the microscope.*

  Prescriptions followed naturally from the premise. If bad air brought disease, it was reasonable to imagine that good air offered some form of protection: a pleasant aroma was a healing aroma. In the Old Testament Aaron averts a plague sent by Yahweh by setting up an incense burner, much as the Thebans burn incense when the pestilence ravages Thebes at the beginning of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Plutarch claimed that physicians brought relief from pestilence by burning a fire, especially if fragrant substances were added. At the Greek town of Callipolis there survives an inscription from the second or third century AD, recording the sacrifice of burned offerings of meat and spices to the ‘gods below the earth’ and the Clarian Apollo, ‘the warder-off of plague’. As the god held responsible for visitations of plague (it was Apollo whose death-dealing arrows struck down the Greeks at the start of the Iliad), Apollo was the natural recipient of such an offering. To offer spices was to please the god responsible for the illness and, in so doing, or so it was hoped, to avert it.

  With the emergence of the scientific study of medicine, the gods were removed from the equation, or at least pushed into the background, but the spices remained. In the medical schools of ancient Greece and Rome the effects of their aromas were systematised and related, however fancifully, to empirical observation. By the fourth century BC suppliers of spices were sufficiently familiar figures that the comedian Alexis (c.375–c.275 BC) could write a comedy entitled The Apothecary, whose character combined the roles of druggist, herbalist and spice merchant. Such was the interest in smells that Theophrastus dedicated a work to the topic, On Odours, in which many of the spices appear for the first time as the subject of sustained philosophical enquiry. Aromatic fumigation had attained the status of medical fact.

  Where Greek medicine led, many others followed.* Credence in the virtues of spices was apparently worldwide, long outlastin
g antiquity. In T’ang China cloves were used for ‘driving off evils’ and ‘getting rid of evil things’. In India the Uzbek polymath Al Biruni (973–1048) witnessed the use of cloves against smallpox, which the Indians took for an airborne malaise arriving from the land of Lanka across the sea:

  The Hindus who are the neighbours of those regions believe that the small-pox is a wind blowing from the island of Lanka towards the continent to carry off souls. According to one report, some men warn people beforehand of the blowing of this wind, and can exactly tell at what times it will reach the different parts of the country. After the small-pox has broken out, they recognise from certain signs whether it is virulent or not. Against the virulent small-pox they use a method of treatment by which they destroy only one single limb of the body, but do not kill. They use as medicine cloves, which they give to the patient to drink, together with gold-dust; and, besides, the males tie the cloves, which are similar to date-kernels, to their necks. If these precautions are taken, perhaps nine people out of ten will be proof against this malady.

  Apart from what looks like a garbled account of inoculation – generally credited to China around 1200 AD, but not used in the West before the early eighteenth century – his account is a fairly representative diagnosis: an airborne illness called for an aromatic prescription.