o it. One late sixteenth-century commentator on America
recommended it as a purge for superfluous phlegm; and smokers believed
it functioned as an antidote for poisons, as an expellant for "sour"
humors, and as a healer of wounds. Some doctors maintained that it
would heal gout and the ague, act as a stimulant and appetite
depressant, and counteract drunkenness.

The full significance of these drugs in the medicine of the period can
be better appreciated by reference to a prescription for their use, in
this instance a remedy for rickets, thought typical by historian Thomas
Jefferson Wertenbaker:

Dip the child in the morning, head foremost in cold water, don't
dress it immediately, but let it be made warm in the cradle & sweat
at least half an hour moderately. Do this 3 mornings ... & if one
or both feet are cold while other parts sweat let a little blood be
taken out of the feet the 2nd morning.... Before the dips of the
child give it some snakeroot and saffern steep'd in rum & water,
give this immediately before diping and after you have dipt the
child 3 mornings. Give it several times a day the following syrup
made of comfry, hartshorn, red roses, hog-brake roots, knot-grass,
petty-moral roots; sweeten the syrup with melosses.

But drug therapy was not always as simple as that recommended for
rickets, although the evidence is that in Virginia the high cost of
importing the rarer substances inclined local physicians toward the
less elaborate compounds. Venice treacle, recommended by the Reverend
Clayton's imaginary purge enthusiast consisted of vipers, white wine,
opium, licorice, red roses, St. John's wort, and at least a half-dozen
other ingredients.

Because their use was so extensive in Europe and because many brought a
good price, any discussion of drugs in seventeenth-century Virginia
should take note of the efforts in the colony to find locally the raw
materials for the drugs both for use in Virginia and for export. The
London Company actively supported a program to develop the drug
resources of the New World, and the hope of finding them had originally
been one of the incentives for the colonization of Virginia. Even as
early as the sixteenth century, authors and promoters in England of the
American venture had held up the promise of a profitable trade in
drugs--sassafras, for example--as a stimulus for exploration and
colonization. Sassafras had market value as it w