The Professor of Secrets
Kevin Barry and some Cures for Colds, Warts and Coughs
Ahem. In Ériu it is freezing cold. There are rumours of bad colds and influenza and monkeys behaving very badly… I was just remembering there was a pandemic in the world just over one hundred years ago, the so-called the Spanish Influenza, which infected 500 million and took the lives of 50 million. The world had come through the most traumatic conflict it had ever seen, the Great War of 1914-18, and the Rising in 1916. Yet you could still dance and be merry. Even with a curfew in Dublin during the War of Independence. Remember Level 5, and the daily intonement of the death toll by the Grim Reaper? Remember the awful-ness of life and how so many businesses and families were splintered and destroyed?
Kevin Barry had a great time, throughout all those disasters. He danced his socks off in the dance halls of Dublin, all through the pandemic. As did many. A fellow UCD student, Honoria Aughney, met Kevin at a céilí. They were dancing to ***The siege of Ennis***, a dance in which you change partners, and Kevin said: “I didn’t know the Carlow girls knew anything about dancing,” to which Honoria answered: “And I didn’t know the rugby players knew anything about it either.”
The Grafton Picture House was a favourite of Kevin and his sister Kitby. In Dublin, the theatres had full houses – the Gaiety, The Queens, the Tivoli, the Theatre Royal, the Empire, La Scala and the Abbey, where the likes of ***The Colleen Bawn*** and ***The Bohemian Girl*** were performed by The Gilbert and Sullivan Company.
The Mattassa Coffee House had a large IRA clientele. Frank Flood, Kevin’s close friend in the H Company and a fellow member of the clandestine Clarke Luby Club, had been in the Mattassa Coffee House with friends the night before an ambush that he and his company carried out in 1921, which led to his execution in Mountjoy Jail.
Even with the curfew imposed in February 1920, Dublin still spilled over with life, in stark contrast to the ghost town it became in recent years. I won’t go on. My cousin described the desolate streets, with poor unfortunate junkies and homeless lurking in the shadows.
In a letter to Kevin’s friend Bapty Maher (who later married Kevin’s sister Shel Barry), he wrote from the family home in Tombeagh, Hacketstown, Co Carlow:
‘How the devil are you at all? You know you might write to a fellow once in a while. I wouldn’t mind me not writing because I’m very busy – pictures, National Library (ahem) and Grafton (5pm to 6pm), but a fellow like you – a bloody gentleman of leisure, you know it’s unforgivable.
‘By the way, that bloody bastard never came with the suit, with the result that I have to borrow one for a dance tomorrow night. Write and tell him that I say he’s a so and so.’
‘When will you be up in town? You ought to come for a céilídhe (College of Science) on the 30th Jan ... yours ’til hell freezes, Kevin.’
Under British rule, most ironically, there might have been more freedom, with a revolutionary war, and a pandemic afoot- than there was during the recent plague. Kevin’s social life in Dublin has vanished. (It has been reborn, of course, but I would not socialise in Dublin today).
GRANDISSIMA- VERY EXTREME
Much of the dread generated by pandemics is caused by the rigid restrictions on daily life- bullying, threats and scare mongering on a scale that might equal…the bubonic plague in Italy in 1527 following the invasion of Italy by Landsknechts. Officials charged around enforcing them in Bologna and the merchant Romolo Amaseo, writing from Bologna in September 1527, reported that the proclamations against the pestilence were “grandissima—very extreme” and that most of the citizens had tried to flee, “if they were not already dead or gravely ill.”
People resented the restrictions. Even as a child, Leonardo would have looked on, terrified, as the health police rapped on people’s doors and demanded entry, burned their belongings in gigantic bonfires, and marched the infected off to the lazzaretto...
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"The remedy they found for relieving the pestilence was this: they ended all those restrictions and let people live in their own way. They ordered the physicians to visit the people in their houses and the pharmacists to give them medicines. After this decree went out, the epidemic didn’t have as much force, and all of a sudden a great gladness grew in the hearts of the people and thus the plague was completely eradicated."- The Professor of Secrets
I found this review of The Professor of SEcrets on Margaret Ball’s site.. a wonderful historical fiction writer who has since passed away .
The Professor of Secrets
Mystery, Medicine, and Alchemy in Renaissance Italy- William Eamon National GeographicCopyright © 2010 William Eamon
The Professor of Secrets reconstructs the frightening underworld of Renaissance science and the denizens of ‘that lost world of alchemists tending their furnaces, craftsmen at their workbenches and surgeons daringly combatting wounds inflicted by terrifying new instruments of war all made up Fioravanti’s world. It is the story of modern science’s birth from the bottom up.’ See full review here
The Late Renaissance seems to have been a bit of a nightmare. Italy was tempting territory for the centralized monarchies on the Continent. The French monarchy, which had consolidated its domestic power following the Hundred Years’ War, and the Catholic monarchs of Spain—regarded Italy with lust, due to its vast wealth and strategic importance.
Said a poor physician of the time of that plague in Italy:
'that there be consigned to me alone twenty-five sick people...and an equal number with similar infirmities to all the physicians of Milan. If I don't cure my patients more quickly and better than they do theirs, I'm willing to be banished forever from the city'. - The Professor of Secrets © 2010 by William Eamon
The Professor of Secrets reveals an alternative story of the Scientific Revolution, told through the voice of a man on the margins. He witnessed charlatans selling their wares in the streets, horrifying cures and treatments, Fioravanti's 'miraculous' contributions to medicine. And the hawkers with their cures.
Eamon exposes a most unromantic world of the ‘Renaissance’. That this first 'celebrity' physician pushed all sorts of cures and elixirs.. but, to my mind, the cures that are touted today are worse than the dis-eases. From what I’ve seen, anyway. I make my own tinctures and cures and there is a wealth to draw from in dear old Ériu. I don’t recommend trying these cures, I’m not a physician but… interesting what they got up to, many years ago.., you can find many old cures in Lady Wilde’s Ancient Legends, There are many in the UCD National Folklore Collection. Archival Reference- The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0905, Page 289.
Image and data © National Folklore Collection, UCD.
Cure for Warts: Bury the head of an eel in the ground. When the eel's head rots the wart falls off.
Cure for whooping cough:
Pass the affected child in and out under a grey ass three times. Then get the ass to chew a piece of loaf bread. Before he swallows it, take it from him and get the child to eat it. OR If a girl marries a man of the same surname as herself the brown bread she makes will cure whooping cough.
Cure for hair falling out-
Wash the bald parts of the head with sheep's milk.
Cure for any wound-
Wash the injured part in one of the many blessed wells in the country
There are many cures from the English countryside, kept in the National Archives in London.
For a headache-
Heat herbs together, put on the ‘mold’ (crown) of the head in a poultice.
For ‘Stoppyng’ Congestions-
Heat stale ale, mustard seeds and ground nutmeg in a small glass over boiling water, then place cloths over their head and inhale the vapours.
All of the nutmeg in the medieval world was grown in the tiny Banda Islands in what is now Indonesia 8,000 miles away from England, traded across the medieval world, by Venetian merchants. This humble cure, above, was preserved on a torn piece of paper.
These 15th-century cold and flu remedies were preserved by chance in the records of the Chancery, the formal writing house of the King. The Chancery miscellanea are records that were collected by the office of the Chancery over its long life.
IF YOU WOULD LIKE A SIGNED COPY OF THE HARDBACK OF THIS BOOK, RARE NOW WITH PHOTOS BY LIOSA MCNAMARA, CONTACT ME.
Ah it is going through so firstly that figure with the big beak looks like a Comedy del Art. The plague, well when that guy says Mercury caused it does he mean the likes of the Black Death. Interesting to know the R Renaissance was not always that wonderful especially when it came to health matters. That dance scene shown looks good but I regret you are likely correct when you say Dublin was a pleasenter place in the 1920s than now and from my own memory it was pleasenter in the 1950s and '60s. Trusting that your fine Kevin Book which I enjoyed a lot is still bought, it contains so much and as I said had he lived he' d certainly have been a successful politician. Interesting how the coffee shop in Phibsboro has changed
Fascinating stuff Siofra, I really enjoyed this. :)
Good for Kevin, dancing the night away during an enforced 'stop in'
The so called Spanish thingy was as a result of the new and untested injections given to the US army, at the request of everyone's favourite philanthropist, Rock er fella. There was a blanket ban on reporting it worldwide at the time apart from in Spain, hence the name Spanish thingy. Returning soldiers who were already exhausted, emaciated and shell shocked were then jibbered with it and most dropped down dead, adding to the bs story.
Apparently the so called plague was as a result of deliberately poisoning with mercury, all the drinking wells. The symptoms certainly give rise to this 'dis-ease'
Seems like the big club have always been trying to kill us, with their made up conditions and fear mongering but worst of all, trying to take away our freedoms.
We had the coastguard out patrolling the beaches here during the last lock up. I galloped my horse and rode my bike along the shore and waved back to them! What were they going to do? Come ashore like some kind of amphibian boat? I grabbed a large stick and wrote FREEDOM on the sand for them to report back to big club with haha!
The only cure out of that list I would go for is the holy well treatment! Now I wonder if that is why wells and other water sources worldwide are under attack?