Home Medicine: The Newfoundland Experience

Melvin Baker is an archivist and historian at Memorial University of
Newfoundland, and the co-editor of Dictionary of Newfoundland and
Labrador Biography.

Home Medicine is the latest scholarly study to use the extensive
archival holdings of the Folklore and Language Archive at the Memorial
University of Newfoundland.

The book is divided into two parts. The first is a brief overview of
the role of health professionals, commercial medicines, and home
remedies in the health care of Newfoundlanders, especially in the
outport areas. The author has made periodic checks of local newspapers
to examine which commercial products were available to residents and how
some of these products quickly became part of traditional home-care
techniques. He discusses the role of St. John’s businessmen in
promoting their products among a mainly illiterate rural populace. One
of these, Gerald S. Doyle, was “probably the most successful
entrepreneur in North America to use radio for promoting medicines.”
Doyle also used newspapers and songbooks to advertise; indeed, his
songbooks did much to “promote local tradition and feeling” during
the 1930s and 1940s.

The second part of the book—and the most interesting for both the
expert and the layperson—is an encyclopedia of the “accounts of
ailments and treatments used or known during the first half of the
twentieth century,” ranging from “Abortion and Birth Control” to
“Zam-Buk Ointment.”

This book will be of interest to students of the history of medicine,
home-care techniques, and the social history of Newfoundland. It will
also find a audience among Newfoundlanders curious to know how their
parents and grandparents provided for their own medical and health
needs.