Frederick Douglass Opie, “Zora Neale Hurston’s Work on Food-Based Prescriptions for Illnesses: A History”

Speaker: Frederick Douglass Opie, Babson College

Zora Neale Hurston’s writings reveal an interest in natural prescriptions for the health challenges suffered by camp workers and plantation laborers. She also talks a great deal about natural remedies for poisoning. She incorporated what she learned about poisoning and natural remedies into her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God and other writings. Hurston writes, “Folk medicine is practiced by a great number of persons [in] sawmill camps, the turpentine stills, mining camps and among the lowly generally,” who do not depend on conventional doctors to cure their ailments. Her subjects had more access to plant-based medicines, or what Hurston called the “folk medicine” and “primitive medicines,” than modern medicine and doctors. Those who did not and, because of lack of access, could not depend on conventional doctors were forced to learn how to safely use herbs that they could grow or forage and therefore were of no cost to them. The more they were forced to depend on these, the more they learned how to use them. In her writings, Hurston recorded some food-based prescriptions for illnesses in Florida and elsewhere. Where they came from specifically is unclear. A look at the ingredients in the natural prescriptions that Hurston records in her writings provides interesting insights into the history of medicine, folk medicine, and food as medicine.

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