Dr. Hill's Medicinal Plants

In colonial America, doctors and householders treated illness with plants from fields, hedgerows, and marshes, drawing on knowledge passed down by word of mouth, lessons from Native Americans and earlier settlers, and their own experiments with North American species unfamiliar to Europeans. Remedies in the 1700's included horseback riding, ground ivy and horehound for coughs, bleeding and herbal preparations for worsening colds and sore throats, and even a powdered human-dung treatment for cataracts. Plants used in household and medicinal practice included bedstraw, mullein, meadowsweet, agrimony, wild geranium, orris root, Culvers root, big blue lobelia, turtlehead, snakeroot, calendula, feverfew, cardinal lobelia, tansy, elecampane, burnet, sage, yarrow, rosemary, mint, rue, and horseradish, serving purposes from dyes and mattress filling to relieving pain, bleeding, indigestion, fever, skin problems, respiratory complaints, and insect infestation. Dr. Richard Hill, born near Annapolis in 1698, was a second-generation colonist who married Deborah Moore in 1721 and settled near London Town, where they raised 12 children, 10 of whom survived to adulthood. In the eighteenth century's "Golden Age of Botany," members of the Royal Society of London sought his knowledge of North American plants, and he used remedies such as quinzy root for throat inflammations and some tumors, tall goldenrod for urinary complaints and wounds, wild senna as a laxative, and Jerusalem oak for worms in children. Likely trained through apprenticeship to a Philadelphia doctor, Hill also worked in his family's shipping and merchant business in Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland, and Madeira. After financial difficulties, probably caused by the loss of a ship at sea, he left London Town for Madeira in 1739, prospered there in trade, gave up medical practice because he was unfamiliar with local plants and diseases, and sent plants including camellias, carnations, lilies, and daffodils back to his son in London Town.

Edgewater, Maryland · United States