ABSTRACT
Build lecture rooms and schools for all. (Peacock, Crochet Castle)
I have earlier discussed, especially in Chapter Five, Beddoes’s salvoes against the pernicious folklore of health circulating amongst the ‘gentlefolk’, and their over-confident selfdiagnosing and -dosing practices. There was also, it goes with out saying, a parallel folklore amongst the ‘commonfolk*. Indeed the two were largely coterminous. Historians have claimed that ‘high’ culture was seceding from ‘low’ culture during the age of the Enlightenment, and increasingly seeking to reform and police it Patrick Curry, for instance, has con vincingly demonstrated that, whereas ‘everybody’ believed in astrology in 1650, a century later, such beliefs had been rele gated to the ‘vulgar’ .1 This cultural bifurcation model, however, applies only very partially to medicine, as any manuscript remedy book compiled by a gentry family will show.2 The hotch potch of cures found in such collections - some deriving from family secrets, some from eminent physicians, some from lords and ladies, some from kitchen maids and stable lads, some from learned texts, newspapers, or such time-tried works as Cul peper’s Herbal, and many from who knows where - bespeaks the enduring eclecticism of medical care in the pre-modern world.5
