Brochures: Haitian plants to cure women's complaints

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Brochures: Haitian plants to cure women's complaints

• 1789 (Creación)

"Two rare brochures giving the recipe for French physician Gilles-Joseph Decourcelle's patent medicine, l'élixir Américain, as well as advertising the third edition of his medical text of the same name.

Decourcelle lived in Saint-Domingue for thirteen years before establishing a practice as an obstetrician in Vitry-le-François. He claimed to have learned the medicinal properties of Caribbean herbs by observing the way in which they were used by women of African descent, including enslaved women, in the French colony. Upon his return to France, he marketed his élixir Américain by prominently emphasising the exotic origin of the ingredients, and promotion their benefits for a myriad of gynaecological and birth-related conditions. The Nancy imprint describes the elixir as a cure "les maladies de lait," and his medical text contains many endorsements from women whose health problems had been relieved by his remedy.

The plants in the recipe which are specifically described as originating in Saint-Domingue are: Cocos aculeatus (root of grugru palm), Crescentia cujete (calabash), Erythroxilum areolatum (bark of smoke wood), Justicia assurgens (sixangle foldwing), Laurus-Persea (avocado leaves) and Saccharum officinarum (root of cane sugar). Given that Erythroxylaceae are natural producers of cocaine, and that one of the other ingredients is listed as Egyptian opium, the medicine would certainly have been potent, if not prescriptively effective.

The different type-settings and regional imprints of these two versions of the same bifolium can be explained by the fact that they were job-printed locally by the distributors of the elixir. In the back of the 1787 third edition of L'Élixir Américain, as advertised in this brochure, there is a list of authorised dispensaries. For Nancy "chez M. Mandel, Directeur de Bureau de confiance" and for Moulins "chez M. Gueriot, capitaine d'Artillerie."

Whilst revealing the specific instructions for the preparation of such patent medicines seems counter intuitive, the exotic ingredients and complex method outlined in the text of the brochure were perhaps more to endorse the product than to inspire the purchaser to attempt to make their own batch at home. These brochures were likely distributed gratis with a bottle of the elixir." –description from Maggs Bros. Ltd. Rare Books & Manuscripts