Economic Botany and a Poetic Botanist

Seeds in vials, Museum of Economic Botany, Adelaide. Image By Col Ford and Natasha de Vere We’ve just returned from a brief holiday visiting family in Alice Springs, which included a two day stopover in Adelaide on the way. While we were strolling through the Adelaide Botanic Gardens, we came across the Santos Museum of Economic Botany and decided to have a look.

Apparently such museums were once commonplace in botanic gardens throughout the English speaking world. They were intended to demonstrate the variety and usefulness of plant material from around the globe. Now the Adelaide museum, opened in 1881, and lovingly preserved and restored, is a unique example .

Entrance is free, but this probably isn’t a place you’d want to take a hyperactive six year old. We felt as if we were reliving our childhood experience of museums. There are one or two interactive exhibits, but the collection consists mainly of traditional wooden display cabinets topped with glass.  They contain collections of dried plants and seeds, oils and wood samples.  Many still have hand-written labels. The realistic looking examples of fruit and vegetables scattered among the displays are actually papier-mache models.

What the museum demonstrates is that, despite the wide variety of environments in which human societies have developed, each has found local plants suitable for every need. Food, medicine, building, furniture, fibres, clothing and shall we say ‘relaxation’ are all included. It’s a fascinating and informative collection.

Quite coincidentally, my holiday reading was “The Invention of Nature“, a biography of the Prussian scientist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt, by Andrea Wulf. Humboldt was a frenetic traveller, collector of specimens and cataloguer of facts. He broke the mould of scientific writing by producing colourful, poetic accounts of his discoveries. In nineteenth century Europe he was a celebrity and his writing influenced Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir and many others. He no doubt also helped make Museums of Economic Botany popular.

(Photo courtesy of Col Ford and Natasha de Vere via Wikimedia Commons)

Babies on the bottle

Advertisement for Chamberlain's Remedy, 1910
Ad for Chamberlain’s Remedy in 1910. The main ingredients were alcohol, ether and chloroform.

As I’ve been doing the research for my next book, which is set in Perth in the early 1900’s, I’ve been surprised, and horrified, to discover the remedies recommended at the time for babies who were unwell with “summer diarrhoea”.  Here’s an excerpt from an article written by a doctor and addressed to mothers.  It appeared in the Daily News, 26 August 1905.

At once stop giving the child milk […] In place of the milk give the infant veal tea with barley water, while white of egg and barley water is another food suitable for the occasion. Other foods still prescribed by physicians are composed, say, of barley water 10 ounces, white of egg half an ounce, and white sugar one teaspoonful. If there is much exhaustion and collapse, a dessertspoonful of brandy should be whipped up with the white of an egg, and a teaspoonful of this given every hour, or oftener if the gravity of the case seems to demand it […]

Brandy was commonly recommended, and this no doubt helped to calm the child and make it appear less distressed. But it’s easy to imagine how babies might be overdosed on the alcohol. Another common recommendation was to give the baby “sherry whey”, sometimes called “white wine whey”. The idea was to remove the solids from the milk, leaving behind the liquid whey. This was supposed to be more digestible. Here’s a recipe for this remedy from a newspaper article written in 1923:

Take a pint of milk, add five tablespoonsful of cooking sherry and stir till it curdles, then strain through boiled butter muslin. Expensive sherry is less acid, and if used for the purpose, more will be required to curdle the milk. It also contains more alcohol, therefore it is better to use the cheaper sherry.
After making any of the above, be sure to keep them in a cool place protected from flies and dust.

By my calculations, this whey would contain 2-3% alcohol, the equivalent of feeding the child on beer. Other recipes contained as much as ten tablespoons of sherry per pint of milk.

But if that didn’t work, the doctor in the first article had other, more drastic suggestions:

If drugs are required at all, try first giving a dose of caster oil. Afterwards the following mixture may be given three times a day to a child of six months, and over:  Tincture of opium, half a minim; dilute nitric acid, two drops ; tincture of ginger, two drops; and water enough to fill a teaspoon.

In an age where there were no antibiotics, no electrolyte replacements and no intravenous fluids, many babies and young children died from diarrhoeal infections. So perhaps it’s understandable that people might try drastic remedies such as brandy, castor oil and opium as a last resort. But needless to say, I don’t recommend any of these suggestions.

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