MY LADY'S HERBS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19221, 9 January 1926, Page 1 (Supplement)

MY LADY'S HERBS.

THE MODERN WAY.

BY KOTARE.

I find it hard to lay down my " Family Herbal." Last week we followed the young housewife through the long and complicated business of stocking her medicine cupboard. In her capacity as physician to her family and friend and adviser of all the neighbouring poor, site required a fully-equipped arsenal of high explosives. The sight of means to do ill deeds makes ill deeds done. So Shakespeare says, anyway. And probably the sight of means to do good deeds makes good deeds done. Our lady could hardly be expected to keep her immense array of decoctions and syrups and cordials without trying out their efficacy. And there was always a corpus vile at hand to servo as the fair field for experiment. Those queer compounds so carefully distilled could not be expected to stay indefinitely in the coy refuge of their bottles. There was her husband, worthy man. She has a perfectly lovely elixir of particular efficacy in the gout. Her husband has shown no signs of that fell disease. But you never know. It is always well to be on the safe side. I can see" that the presence of those groaning shelves in the medicine cupboard must have added a new terror to the lives of the usually harmless and deserving class of husbands. Perhaps they accepted it as an inevitable part of the obligations of matrimony. The servants were also a sitting mark. She could get them whenever she wanted them. . My lady with two gallon jars of distilled waters, excellent against the colic or the jaundice, would track down the slightest symptoms of eithei distressing complaint with the enthusiasm and conviction of a witch-finder. She couldn't possibly be prepared to cure attacks of colic and then find no colic to cure. Take it all round, the lot of the servant cannot have been altogether a happy one. One can imagine a radical serving maid, an independent young woman of the modern type born a century too soon, stipulating before entering on her period of service that her mistress was on no account to prescribe for her ailments. And the mistress would wonder what the world was coming to; the mistress had scarcely any privileges left. Her Patients. While her children were growing up there would be no dearth of material to practise on. Possibly the readiness with which English boys have acquiesced in the barbarous school system that separates the children from their parents during their most formative years may be due to the terrors inspired ny the well-stocked medicine cupboard. Though,- even at school they would find the same shadow over them. Brimstone and treacle figured as a specific in some schools of the period if wo are to-believe Dickens' picture of Dotheboys Hall. The poor in the villages were so largely dependant on my lady's charity in, other things that they would readily accept her ministrations in the matter of physic. It was a sign of interest, a dim shadowing of the brotherhood of man the great world outside was talking so much about, and a little sympathy in those days and under those conditions would mean more than we can understand to-day. So we see my lady with her potions marching forth against disease ort the countryside. But a bold peasantry, their country's pride. When once destroyed; can never be supplied. But she had no thought of that possible danger. Indeed, she thought she was doing her part toward preserving the bold peasantry aforesaid. "Bold" is the right word for them. It must have taken courage to swallow some of these home-made elixirs and to smile back gratitude. _ Interest In Health.

The interest in health is one of the most • intelligible instincts in mankind. Everything else depends on the bodily condition. The grim shadow of possible sickness falls in everybody's path. Mostmen, as society is constituted to-day, have to build their lives on the assumption that they shall always be fit for their work. They know it is a false assumption; that they are Tittle likely to be always immune. But ill-health means that wages cease, that payments on the family home fall into arrears, <£hat other expenses mount upward. If he always visualised all the possibilities, no ordinary man would risk matrimony or any increase of financial responsibility. He has to gamble on his health, or remain solitary, unenterprising. The fount and origin of most of the discontent with the present economifl'.and social conditions are to be found here. Man wants more security. He wants to know that Sickness does not mean dire hardship for his dependants, the ruin of all his plans and hopes as a family man. For the rich man ilhhealth means discomfort, pain, limitation; but nothing more. For the average man it means that the bottom has fallen out of his universe.

I suppose it has always meant that. That is why the quack has always flourished, and the doctor to-day holds the position in many people's minds once occupied by the priest. The absorbing interest in health is, as we have seen, not always morbid or hypochondriacal. The patent medicine, being mixed with faith in him that takes, can boast its victories, which by astute advertisement work on minds predisposed to believe. While we smile at my lady's enthusiasm for doctoring her friends and dependants, we can remember that there are more patent medicines on the market to-day than at any other period of our history. We grow more credulous as we think we grow more wise. You can buy a sack of Glauber's salts for the price you pay locally for a neat, much-advertised package under a quasi-scientific name. There is much more money to be made out of the exploitation of men's fears than from ministering to their ideals and aspirations. The Old and the New. The old medicines are gone. Who hears to-day of Daffy's Elixir, once the most potent of man's allies against sickness? I have come across its path in tho literature of the 17th century, and well on into the 18th. But I ,have never heard of it in modern times. And what of Ward's Pills Fielding and the other ,18th century novelists belauded for their singular gift of travelling to the brain if the brain were sick, and setting out for the feet if there were gout or rheumatism ? Where are the snows of yester-year ? After all, my lady compounded her medicines as experience had shown the wav. The old family herbs had been tried out over many generations, and, however foolish many of" the prescriptions appear to-day, there was at least this basis of experience. There was no theory behind the business; it was all pure empiricism. Her modern counterpart works largely by advertisement. We may not know much more about the action of drugs on the human body, but at least we know more of the working of men's minds. The modern science of psychology is the basis of modern advertising. My lady knew nothing of psychology, had never heard of it. She saw sickness on every hand around her; she believed that for every illness Nature had provided a remedy, and she used the winnowed experience of many generations to bring the virtue of her'herbs into contact with, disease that was never far from her own household and tho village cottage. For my part, I never see the flaunting advertisement of the modern quack specific without a tender regret for the day that is gone. A flaminc sky-sign and a gentle lady off to the village with her basket of cordials and infusions and decoctions : they stand as symbols of the davs that are and the days that were. My vote goes for tho lady every time.