The Portuguese Visitandines and Domestic Remedies (Eighteenth Century)

The first Portuguese convent of the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary was founded in Lisbon in 1784 by French and Portuguese nuns. The Visitandines rapidly compiled recipes relating to cookery, hygiene and beauty, pharmacopoeia, and household management. The result was the production of a collection comprising 174 recipes and two novenas, some considerably earlier in origin and others reflecting contemporary realities. Within this recipe collection, 36 preparations were intended to address health problems, representing 20.6 per cent of the total. The recipes were designed both for ingestion and for topical application, and the preparations were described as balms, broths, poultices, prescriptions, and remedies. They were intended to treat a wide range of ailments, including the healing of wounds, epistaxis (nosebleeds), various forms of pain, different types of fever, injuries, gout (arthritis caused by an excess of uric acid), hemorrhoids, intestinal worms, emaciation, ophthalmological disorders, pleurisy, ruptures (hernias), and coughs, among others. Until the eighteenth century, Europe as a whole shared similar dietary principles grounded in the writings of Hippocrates (460–379 BCE), Galen (c. 129–217), and Avicenna (c. 980–1037). This meant that cookery fulfilled the fundamental function of rendering foods digestible according to medical conceptions that had prevailed since Antiquity. The preservation of health was understood to depend upon a balance involving multiple factors, both internal and external to the individual. In light of this source, it becomes important to examine similarities and differences between the remedies compiled by the nuns of the Visitation of Holy Mary and contemporary pharmacopoeias, assessing the presence of food as medicine at a time when chemical pharmacy was already gaining prominence. Moreover, the recipe collection makes it possible to identify not only a variety of health concerns but also the incorporation of products originating from other continents, revealing the continual updating of pharmacological practice even within cloistered environments.