Customs and Fashions in Old New England

								

"Collick" and "Stomack-Ach," I feel sure every respectable Puritan
patient child died rather than swallow the disgusting and nauseous
compounds that were offered to him for his relief.
Puritan babies also wore medical ornaments, "anodyne necklaces." I find
them advertised in the Boston Evening Post as late as 1771--"Anodine
Necklaces for the Easy breeding of Childrens Teeth," worn as nowadays
children wear strings of amber beads to avert croup.
Another medicine "to make children's teeth come without paine" was this:
"Take the head of a Hare boyled a walm or two or roahed; and with the
braine thereof mingle Honey and butter and therewith anoynt the Childes
gums as often as you please." Still further advice was to scratch the
child's gums with an osprey bone, or to hang fawn's teeth or wolf's
fangs around his neck--an ugly necklace.
The first scene of gayety upon which the chilled baby opened his sad
eyes was when his mother was taken from her great bed and "laid on a
pallat," and the heavy curtains and valances of harrateen or serge were
hung within and freshened with "curteyns and vallants of cheney or
calico." Then, or a day or two later, the midwife, the nurses, and all
the neighboring women who had helped with advice or work in the
household during the first week or two of the child's life, were bidden
to a dinner. This was also a French fashion, as "Les Caquets de
l'Accouchée," the popular book of the time of Louis XIII., proves.
Doubtless at this New England amphidromia the "groaning beer" was drunk,
though Sewall "brewed my Wives Groaning Beer" two months before the
child was born. By tradition, "groaning cake," to be used at the time of
the birth of the child, and given to visitors for a week or two later,
also was made; but I find no allusion to it under that name in any of
the diaries of the times. At this women's dinner good substantial viands
were served. "Women din'd with rost Beef and minc'd Pyes, good Cheese
and Tarts." When another Sewall baby was scarcely two weeks old,
seventeen women were dined at Judge Sewall's on equally solid meats,
"Boil'd Pork, Beef, Fowls, very good Rost Beef, Turkey, Pye and Tarts."
Madam Downing gave her women "plenty of sack and claret." A survival of
this custom existed for many years in the fashion of drinking caudle at
the bedside of the mother.
As might be expected of a man who diverted himself in attending the
dissection of an Indian, which gruesome gayety exhilarated him into
spending a tidy sum--for him--on drinks and feeing "the maid;" and in
visiting his family tomb; and who, when he took his wife on a pleasure
trip to Dorchester "to eat cherries and rasberries," spent his entire
day within-doors reading that cheerful book, Calvin on Psalms;--in the
house of such a pleasure-seeker but small provision was made for the
entertainment or amusement of his children. They were sometimes led
solemnly to the house of some old, influential, or pious person, who