Intercultural Knowledge · Medicine Without Physicians: A History of Home Remedies

The Seneca snakeroot, polygala senega, depicted in Jacob Bigelow's American Medical Botany with a colored engraving on the left page and a description of the plant and its medicinal properties on the right page.

Seneca snakeroot, polygala senega, depicted in Jacob Bigelow's American Medical Botany (1818).

Settlers from Europe carried their tradition of self-help and herbal remedies with them to the Americas. Challenged with both new and old afflictions, these people continued to practice botanical medicine and develop herbal cures utilizing the plants that were native to their new environment.

The knowledge of the indigenous peoples of the Americas were a vital part of adapting Euro-American medicine to their new environments by incorporating indigenous ethnobotanical knowledge and practices.

The Seneca snakeroot, polygala senega, is one such example of this intercultural knowledge. It is named after the Seneca people, the Indigenous American group its medicinal properties were learned from. The herbalism practiced by Indigenous Americans across the continent, and their knowledge of the local flora, was adopted into Americans’ botanical practices. On display is the Seneca snakeroot in Jacob Bigelow’s famous botanical reference book, and its origins and uses as described in John Gunn’s popular home medicine guide, Gunn's Domestic Medicine (1840).

Title page for American Medical Botany (1818) by Jacob Bigelow, 1786-1879.

Title page of Jacob Bigelow's American Medical Botany (1818).

Title page of Gunn's Domestic Medicine (1839) by John C. Gunn. This was a popular home remedy guide.

Gunn describes the popularization of Seneca snakeroot by a doctor who learned it from the Seneca indigenous people. It starts This root possesses more virtues than any one used in medicine; and of all the roots used in medicine it is by far the most valuable. It is now more than eighty years since the virtues were made known to physicians, by Doctor John Tenant, who learned its use from the Senagaroos tribe of Indians.

Seneca snakeroot page in Gunn's Domestic Medicine (1839). It reads "This root possesses more virtues than any one used in medicine; and of all the roots used in medicine it is by far the most valuable. It is now more than eighty years since the virtues were made known to physicians, by Doctor John Tenant, who learned its use from the Senagaroos tribe of Indians."

Engraved portrait of Henry Bibb, American author and abolitionist, in his autobiography. Bibb is an African American male depicted in a suit with his hand resting on a book looking directly at the reader.

Frontispiece engraved portrait of Henry Bibb, an American author and abolitionist who escaped enslavement, in his autobiography Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave (1850).

“He asked me what was the matter; but I felt very bad indeed. He of course thought I was sick with the colic and ran in the house and got some hot stuff for me, with spice, ginger, and &c.” p.171

In this passage, taken from a portion of Henry Bibb’s slave narrative after his successful second escape from enslavement, Bibb described a treatment that a man offers him when he is believed to be sick. The medicine was a hot spiced mixture, a botanical remedy, that contained ginger “and &c.,” likely meaning other herbs. After his escape, Bibb worked as an agent for the Underground Railroad and continued publishing about the abolishment of slavery when he fled to Canada after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

Africans and African Americans preserved their own medical practices and traditions that were also based in botany and herbalism. Although Bibb's autobiography does not capture the exchange and influence of enslaved people's knowledge and practices on American medicine, and vice versa, Bibb's account documents the prevelance of botanical and herbal remedies in the United States.