Southern Folk Medicine, 1750-1820 explores methods of cure during a time when the South relied more heavily on homespun remedies than on professionally prescribed treatments. Bringing to light several previously unpublished primary sources, Kay K. Moss inventories the medical ingredients and practices adopted by physicians, herb women, yeoman farmers, plantation mistresses, merchants, tradesmen, preachers, and quacks alike. Moss shows how families passed down cures as heirlooms, how remedies crossed cultural and ethnic boundaries, and how domestic healers compounded native herbs and plants with exotic ingredients. Moss assembles her picture of domestic medical practice largely from an analysis of twelve commonplace books--or repositories of information, medical and otherwise--kept by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century southerners. She reveals that men and women of all social classes collected medical guidance and receipts in handwritten journals. Whether well educated or unlettered, many preferred home remedies over treatment by the region's few professional physicians. Of particular interest to natural historians, an extensive guide to medicinal plants, their scientific names, and their traditional uses is also included.

A Curious Garden of Herbs is a richly illustrated collection of herbal fact and lore that illuminates the "why" rather than the "how" of the historical kitchen garden. Rather than offering a how-to of gardening methods, Kay K. Moss and Suzanne S. Simmons trace herbs and their uses back to earlier times and places. A Curious Garden of Herbs is peppered with reflections and observations from manuscripts and published herbals that detail the historical uses and fascinating stories surrounding plants of documented interest in the early American South and mid-Atlantic. Practicality and necessity were the guiding theses for gardening in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century rural and frontier settlements in the Southeast. There were plants for food, for seasoning, for medicine, for dye, for insect repellency, and for scent. While many of these plants were also decorative, utility dominated the rationale of backcountry gardeners. Unlike the experimental and exotic collections of Thomas Jefferson and other wealthy gentleman botanists, the gardens detailed in these pages are generally of the "middling sort"-of townspeople and farmers, of "housewives," merchants, and artisans. A Curious Garden of Herbs brings these everyday herbs to life with sixty historical illustrations. In addition to including the well-known varieties such as parsley, lavender, cucumber, and asparagus, this wonderfully illustrated catalog of more than a hundred plants also reveals new ways to enjoy violet, rose, and nasturtium. Moss and Simmons also encourage readers to invite lesser-known plants, such as wild purslane, mullein, and wood sorrel into their gardens and conversations.