Lingua Latina Medica Accessabilis Facta, or, Medical Latin Made Accessible

You may remember John Ward from previous posts, such as A window on the (Ward) world, or An Italian naturalist in London, or Small Latin and Less Greek, or Printers and Authors in 1659, or Early modern straws; or, quills are not just for writing. We can’t get enough of him. In addition to his spiritual duties, Ward also practiced medicine, though there is no documentary record that he underwent any formal medical training or apprenticeship. However, he was personally acquainted with such eminent scientists and physicians as Robert Boyle and Thomas Willis, the botanist Jacob Bobart of the Oxford Physic Garden, and Nicholas Culpeper, author of The Complete Herbal and the Pharmacopoiea Londinensis. As evidenced by hundreds of entries—in Latin and in English—in his notebooks, Ward took great interest in the medical and scientific developments of his time. And while he was adept at moving between the two languages with no loss of comprehension, such skill is not so common today. This gap led to the creation of John Ward’s Latin.

The symbol before “Vngu. dialth.” is the alchemical character ♃ for Jupiter, which Ward used as the equivalent of the ℞ or Rx still seen on modern prescriptions. The symbol was originally used as an instruction to the apothecary for what ingredients to combine into a medicine; but when Ward uses it, it appears consistently as a marker for the beginning of a receipt or recipe (the terms are interchangeable). For our transcription of this symbol, we decided to use the more familiar “Rx.” In this receipt, Ward instructs the apothecary, or reminds himself, of the ingredients needed to treat a case of shingles:

Take one-half ounce of dialthea Ointment
oil of camomile six drams
white wine vinegar one dram

In order to make Ward’s entries more comprehensible to modern readers (in a planned digital edition), we felt that we needed to know what the dialthea ointment was made from. After some hunting through pharmacopoeias and other medical references of the time, it turned out that it is a combination of the roots and seeds of the marsh mallow (Althea officinalis) boiled with olive oil, beeswax, gums, and resins.

John Ward’s Latin developed slowly at first but has continued to grow and expand, becoming an essential reference work for those transcribers of Ward’s notebooks who aren’t familiar with Latin, especially for the later volumes where the quantity of Latin recipes increased greatly. Such a guide, and the shared vocabulary it provided, increased accuracy and helped transcribers and researchers alike to make sense of the ingredients in Ward’s medicines and his instructions for their use. Here is a more complex receipt that can be translated with the help of John Ward’s Latin into a more accessible and understandable recipe for modern readers:

Ward’s precise directions for the use of various combinations of ingredients in medications and applications provides rich details to modern readers and researchers interested in early modern approaches to treating various ailments. He gives instructions for doses (Latin “dosis,” which he abbreviates “dos.”) and the timing of their administration, and how to use those medications compounded for external application, sometimes even specifying the time of the month or of the year, as in these examples:

In V.a.297, leaf 20v-21r, a receipt for a mixture for “Courses To provoke” includes senna, sabina (savin juniper), flowers of lesser centaury, solutive syrup of roses, and agaric lozenges, which he directs to be mixed into a drink to be taken “circa novilunium” (around the time of the new moon).

As the work of transcription and vetting proceeded, the glossary evolved. Originally a resource for simple Latin/English translations, it now includes at least one citation from John Ward’s notebooks (with call number and folio number) for each entry, to allow users of John Ward’s Latin to see the name of an ingredient in context and to see how Ward used some others.

Here is an example entry for the word “collyrium” in John Ward’s Latin:

And here is how the word appears, in abbreviated form, at the end of the original entry:

For those interested in the history of medicine, Ward also calls for many ingredients that are no longer used in mainstream medicine. Here are some examples:

• “Intestin. Lup. pulueriz.”: pulverized wolf intestine (in a receipt for “Cholick,” V.a.298, leaf 51r)
• “cum succo fimi equini non castrati ℥i”: with the juice of the feces of a horse that has not been gelded (“for the wormes,” V.a.293, leaf 4v), and in one place specifying that the stallion be one that eats oats: “eq. non castrat. auenas comedent.” (for “pleurisie,” V.a.298 152r)
• album graecum, “Greek white,” the dried feces of a dog or other bone-eating carnivore (“Alb. Graec. parum [a little bit] for a sore throat,” V.a.287, leaf 59v)
• and others, such as prepared powder of millipedes (V.a.297, leaf 65r, for “Stone”), oil of earthworms (V.a.295, leaf 58v, “good for cutt or spraind sinews”), and oil of swallows (V.a.288, leaf 5v, for “Bruised”)

You get the idea. The notebooks are an almost endless source of early modern medical information in English and Latin, as well as ancient history, current events, local news, and gossip. He fluidly moves between English, Latin, and Greek, depending on his sources.

Since assembly began in 2020, John Ward’s Latin has grown from 147 short entries to over 2,600 entries (and nearly 3,000 specific page references). It will continue to grow, as we are always finding new words that need to be included and some embarrassingly incorrect entries that need amendment or deletion. It remains an essential ingredient to the success of our project, and we hope that it will also be useful for other researchers working with highly abbreviated Latin receipts. If you want to add a word to the glossary, please forward the information to reference@folger.edu.

It seems fitting to end with vicar and physician John Ward’s own words (lifted from someone else’s sermon, most likely!):