ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Edward Taylor’s Dispensatory: Medicinal Cannibalism in Late 17th-Century New England

• In Event: Early Modern Medicine 1

English Abstract

In early modern Europe, medical practitioners and consumers alike turned to the human body as a source of medicine. Bones, blood, flesh, and even mummies were all considered legitimate remedies. My paper explores the medical Dispensatory of New England physician, poet, and Puritan pastor Edward Taylor (1642-1729), as a lens to investigate this practice of medicinal cannibalism in early colonial Puritan contexts.

Preserved in the Beinecke Library, Taylor’s medical Dispensatory is part recipe book, part reference manual gathering a wide range of mineral, plant, animal, and chemical medicines. Yet its most curious sections are two extensive lists of human parts and substances intended for medical use, divided into those taken “Touching while living” and those taken “Touching Dead body or flesh.” According to the Dispensatory, blood is to be drunk to help with the falling sickness, dead body or flesh helps clotted blood and purges the head, and mans skull is good for head diseases.

This paper contextualizes and compares Taylor’s Dispensatory with other medical texts from New England in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Other physicians in New England who were followers of Paracelsus, like John Winthrop Jr. (1606-1676), opted for remedies that excluded human substances. Cotton Mather (1663-1728) was an overt denouncer of Paracelsianism and adversary of witchcraft in Boston and surrounding areas. How was medicinal cannibalism perceived in colonial New England in the context of Puritanism and stories of witchcraft and ‘other’ cannibals? My paper uses Taylor's Dispensatory as a case study to understand the contours of medicine in the New World.

Author

• Abigail Beckett, McGill University