Discover our newly displayed 18th-century book of medical recipes, where science meets superstition – with Welbeck Assistant Curator Dr Lauren Batt.
In the 18th century, when medicine was still largely experimental and professional doctors were mostly men, many women took health into their own hands. One such woman was Margaret, Duchess of Portland (1715–1785), a prominent collector – not just of natural specimens, art and antiquities, like the famous Portland Vase – but also of medical and culinary knowledge.
Among her surviving manuscripts is a green vellum-bound book, dated 13 October 1736, containing medicinal recipes carefully copied out by Margaret herself. It offers a fascinating window into the world of Enlightenment-era home healthcare, and the crucial role women played in it. The book of medical cures is on display in our museum until 7 December 2025.
A Female Network of Knowledge
Margaret’s recipes were gathered from a wide circle of friends and family. Of the 73 individuals who contributed, 84% were women, ranging from fellow duchesses to household staff like “Nurse Dot.” To these handed-down recipes, Margaret added personal notes with her own observations and adjustments.
This hands-on approach to health mirrored the intellectual community Margaret was part of. As a member of the Blue Stockings Society, a group of educated women who gathered to discuss literature, science, and ideas, she valued the wisdom of her female peers at a time when male physicians still dominated formal medical practice.
Margaret began compiling her recipe book as a young wife and soon-to-be mother in her early twenties. Unsurprisingly, many of the remedies reflect maternal concerns. There are several recipes to prevent miscarriage and soothe sore breasts, and at least 16 focused on common childhood illnesses, such as rickets, fevers, and convulsions.
These recipes were not just a collection, but a well-used household resource. Letters from her friend Mary Delany describe how Margaret reached for the book to treat her 10-year-old son, Lord Edward, when he began showing signs of illness. The remedy she used on that occasion, Gascoigne’s Powder, was among the more elaborate in the book.
Gascoigne’s Powder: A Luxury Cure
The powder called for ingredients like pearl, red coral, amber, and “oriental bezoar”, a rare substance from the stomachs of goats in Persia or India. These ingredients were crushed, mixed with jelly, and formed into medicinal balls. A single dose could cost up to eight shillings, more than a week’s wages for a labourer.
Such recipes reflected the wealth and global reach of the Portland household. Many of the ingredients came from across the British Empire. Margaret may have used the same networks that supplied her “Portland Museum” with plant and animal specimens, to stock her medicine cabinet.
Many of the so-called medical discoveries of 18th-century Western medicine were neither new nor Western in origin. Remedies that relied on “exotic” ingredients – such as the bezoar stones used in Gascoigne’s Powder, or guaiacum from the Americas used in Captain Cole’s recipe for rheumatism – were often appropriated from non-European traditions, stripped of their cultural context and repackaged as fashionable cures for the European elite.
At the same time, colonial attitudes were sometimes compounded by gender bias to delay the adoption of effective medicines. When women helped introduce new methods, their contributions were often sidelined. A close friend of Margaret’s mother, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, for example, learned about smallpox inoculation from women in Turkey and brought the idea to England in 1721. There, she encountered a great deal of resistance from the medical establishment, in part because it was a foreign folk remedy rooted in female practice. Inoculation was largely dismissed until Edward Jenner promoted vaccination as a scientific breakthrough decades later. The critical role of Montagu and the medical knowledge of Turkish women were effectively written out of the dominant historical narrative, highlighting how both patriarchy and colonialism shaped what counted as legitimate medicine.
Science, Folklore, and Fear
Not every recipe in Duchess Margaret’s book relied on exotic substances. Some, like Mrs. Crew’s remedy for gout, used common ingredients like elderflowers, vinegar, and bay salt, items most households could access. These recipes show how everyday knowledge of local herbs and preservation techniques shaped medical care across all social classes.
Some remedies have not aged well, incorporating toxic ingredients like mistletoe berries (an essential part of Lady Stapleton’s cure for The Cramp). Others relied on ritual rather than reason. One nosebleed remedy, for instance, involved smearing blood from your palm onto your forehead, and then pushing moss (taken from the head of a corpse that had been hung in chains, of course) into your nostrils.
Duchess Margaret’s recipe book reflects a medical world in transition. Her cures drew from botany, superstition, colonial trade, and personal experience. Some of the treatments have since been validated – herbal herbal extracts with antiseptic or anti-inflammatory properties, for instance – but others were little more than hopeful guesses.
Margaret had good reason to keep a varied arsenal of remedies. In an era before antibiotics or vaccines, nearly two-thirds of children in cities like London died before age five. Margaret herself lost two daughters, one at age two and another at sixteen.
Her recipe book reveals how 18th-century women merged domestic care with emerging scientific curiosity. Long before medicine became professionalized, women like Margaret were experimenting, documenting, and sharing their findings between themselves.
In doing so, they preserved a wealth of informal medical knowledge that may otherwise have been lost, offering modern readers a deeply human glimpse into the fears, hopes, and practical ingenuity of eighteenth-century high society.
Visit our museum to see Duchess Margaret’s book on display until 7 December 2025.
Dr Lauren Batt
Lauren is a historian and Curator at Welbeck Abbey.
Her experience includes historical research for Gucci, and projects at Chatsworth, Hardwick Hall, and Derby Museums.