French Native medicine & Plants

Medicine history in France relies on how the medical field and medical institutions in France have evolved over the centuries.

In France, early medicine was characterized by the Catholic Church and governed by it. Medicine and education were one of the church's many charitable endeavors.

New ideas took hold in the world of medicine during the French Revolution era, and medicine became more scientific, and hospitals became more medical.

Paris Medicine is a concept that describes the series of medical changes and treatment provided at a hospital that occurred during the French Revolution era.

Ideas of the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution have been introduced into the medical field.

In the 1530s the French explorer Cartier arrived in the St Lawrence Valley. From then on, Canada remained French until England took over, in 1760. To the south, this land, this New France, developed much slower than New England or New Spain.

In New Spain, medicine came first. As early as 1579, the University of Mexico held a medical school. They graduated from some sort of ivory-tower medical scholar long before French or English settlers came. Not until after the Revolution did Harvard establish a medical school. It was 1820 before they had one in Canada.

That may have given the North an early advantage in the long run. New Spain had a hold on Medieval Europe's fixed academic medicine, but the French and the English were on their own. Thereby they paid better attention to indigenous medicine, and new medical practices evolved. 

In the 18th century, French medicine changed rapidly. Modern clinical science was born; observations of the actions of diseases and medicines began to be made on living bodies as well as on medieval traditions, which remained important. In this intellectual environment, one can find the collection of Antoine Simon Le Page du Pratz of simple medicines of the natives of Louisiana and his observation of their remedies. 

His comparisons between wild medicine and French medicine from the first quarter of the 18th century tell us more about the scientific spirit of the century than about the progress of medicine in the metropolis.

Consequently, as du Pratz says in his treatise "Histoire de la Louisiane," he began to collect and send to France plants of more than three hundred "simples" at the request of the Commissioner-Ordonnateur La Chaise, together with a memoir of their virtues to be established by the Compagnie des Indes in a botanical garden.

Taking light of the French medical theory and practice of the day, we will be addressing some remedies.

From the remarkable clinical innovation which would make France the leading center for biomedical advances by the end of the century, the practical medicine of early eighteenth-century France was not yet identified.

Instead, it consisted of a manuscript of theory and practice of the classical, medieval, and renaissance. The galenic humoral theory was at its foundation, over 1500 years old by then:

The body's main substances were the four humours, blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. Sound health depended on these touches of humor being able to balance correctly. Their harmonious relationship was disturbed by corruption and thus caused illness.

Treatment consisted obviously of eradicating the body of corruption and adjusting the humour to its correct equilibrium. Bleeding, blistering, sweating, vomiting, and purging were the logical means to cleanse the body and thereby restore health.

Another medical historian, John Duffy, is eager to argue that Indian herbal remedies, so central to Du Pratz's discussions, were quite useless or of importance in the colony, which Duffy maintains was strongly influenced by the traditional practice of French medical schools.

Duffy presents Du Pratz as an educated layperson rather than a qualified researcher, concerned in his work to play the modern trend for herborizing and uncritically admiring all the actions of the noble savage.

He claims that because colonial officials have made constant demands for medicines and medicinal plants to be transported from France, the comparatively numerous Louisiana surgeons and apothecaries used by the Crown, the concessions, and the Indies Company must not, in reality, have used native plants and therapies.

Du Pratz had a wide range of skillful persons. The French surgeon on contract to his concession at least at the beginning of his work in Louisiana, although he declined special skills, had to be competent in dealing with everyday afflictions. Du Pratz also mentions therapy sessions with several other French surgeons and physicians (apparently in New Orleans), one of whom had 12 years of the Parisian experience.

It appears that Du Pratz also had a particularly useful set of Indian informants, particularly his young female servant (or slave) from the Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana.

This young woman was familiar with the Natchez language and culture described in such detail by Du Pratz, and undoubtedly taught him most of what he knew about it.

His neighbors and friends from the Natchez tribe, seem to have found his friendship valuable and treated him as an honored guest in their country, offering him volunteer support for everything, including medical problems.

In observing novelties, both human and natural, most commentators have praised Du Pratz's spirit of curiosity and open-mindedness; indeed, his publication of much of the History material in the Journal Oeconomique shows that he was at least a minor participant in the Enlightenment's metropolitan intellectual ferment.

Accordingly, Du Pratz's observations can be divided into three categories: French and Indian cures by Indian doctors; reports of the significant herbal constituents of the native pharmacopeia with various statements on efficacy and use; and African treatments by an African doctor.

The eighteenth-century comprehensive nosologies, or classifications of illness, were yet to come; at this stage, the traditional handbooks recognized only abstract physical conditions identifiable by symptoms arising in groups or syndromes.

The systematic nosologies, or classifications of illness, of the eighteenth century Among the early classifications that represented this now strange thought was that of Linnaeus, who described fevers, pains, mental disorders, paralysis, seizures, stoppages, watery evacuations, deformities, and external lesions as significant classes.

Anyone who has read Du Pratz's History will surely recognize from the brief outline that his views on health and disease did not corroborate these standard European precepts. As Duffy observed, it happens that Indian medical practices were not so divergent from European ones, with the exception of the European surgery practice.

However, overall, Indian doctors appear to have favored committing and sweating for maintenance purification, while Europeans seem to prefer bleeding. Yet, Europeans had started to use mineral substances more frequently and were well on their way to the excesses of so-called "heroic medicine," with its violent bleedings and purgations enthusiastically dosing patients into the grave.

Reason enough for anybody to look for a milder symptomatic treatment regime. 

Yet the reason Du Pratz prefers native treatment is not simple.

In the case of his "sciatica," both French and Indian treatments were similar: bloodletting followed by the use of cooling substances-in one example by immersion in baths, in the other by the application of a herbal compress.

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Although the Histoire does not include a lengthy memoir, Du Pratz says that he wrote about the three hundred simple ones sent to France, it makes comments on the medicinal properties of some twenty of the botanical species described in the book section on natural history.

A list of the plants categorized by the complaints for which the plants awarded cures: it approximates a summary of typical health problems and treatments in the colony, reflecting the practical interest of the Louisiana medicine consideration of Du Pratz:

These are remedies for fundamentally strong bodies that are exposed to dietary problems (antidiarrhea, stomach soothers, possibly hemorrhoid cure), accidents involving hard work, and sometimes risky conflicts (wound dressings, antivenin), and relatively routine pain (toothache, headache, female disorders).

Besides, febrifuges are continually being requested for the therapy of malaria and other fevers and sudorifics for sweating treatments that have supplemented nearly all systemic diseases.

In the native pharmacopeia, there may have been far more and more nuanced cures, but these remedies were the ones that the French needed; it would be a mistake to think that the list is exhaustive.

The efficacy of these remedies was rationalized by Du Pratz himself based on ancient principles of resemblance: cottonwood root is therefore useful for wounds and red; three-leaved liana is suitable for female disorders, and its fruit resembles the cowrie shells of Guyana (often observed to resemble female genitalia); button snakeroot is an antivenin for rattlesnake bite and the seeds rattle like that snake inside its dried seed pod.