I can now understand the reason for the unceasing, the incurable melancholy that hung like a heavy black shadow over so many Puritan divines in the early days of New England, as their gloomy sermons, their sad diaries and letters, plainly show. Those poor ministers had no chance to use these receipts and thus get cured of "worms in the brain," with annual salaries of only £60, which they had to take in corn, wheat, codfish, or bearskins, in any kind of "country pay," or even in wampum, in order to get it at all. Rubies and pearls and gold and coral were scarce drugs in clerical circles in Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth plantations. Even amber and ivory were far from plentiful. We find John Winthrop writing in 1682, "I am straitened, having no ivory beaten, neither any pearle nor corall." Cleopatra drinks were out of fashion in the New World. So Mather and Hooker and Warham were condemned to die with uncheered spirits and unjewelled stomachs.
Another ingredient, unicorns' horns, which were ground and used in powders, must have been difficult to obtain in New England, although I believe Governor Winthrop had one sent to him as a gift from England; and John Endicott, writing to him in 1634, said: "I have sent you Mrs Beggarly her Vnicorns horne & beza stone." Both the unicorn's horn and the bezoar stone were sovereign antidotes against poison. At another time Winthrop had sent to him "bezoar stone, mugwort, orgaine, and galingall root." Ambergris was also too rare and costly for American Puritans to use, though we find Hull writing for golden ambergroose.
Insomnia is not a bane of our modern civilization alone. This little book shows that our ancestors craved and sought sleep just as we do. Here is a prescription to cure sleeplessness, which might be tried by any wakeful soul of modern times, since it requires neither rubies, pearls, nor gold for its manufacture:
"Bruise a handful of Anis-seeds, and steep them in Red Rose Water, & make it up in little bags, & binde one of them to each Nostrill, and it will cause sleep."
So aniseed bags were used in earlier days for a purpose very different from our modern one; if your nineteenth century nose should refuse to accustom itself to having bags hung on it, you can "Chop Chammomile & crumbs of Brown Bread smal and boyl them with White Wine Vinegar, stir it wel and spred it on a cloth & binde it to the soles of the feet as hot as you can suffer it." And if that should not make you sleepy, there are frankincense-perfumed paper bags for your head, and some very pleasant things made of rose-leaves for your temples, and hard-boiled eggs for the nape of your neck--you can choose from all of these.