Lucy Meriwether Lewis Marks: A Folk Healer

Painting by John Toole, 1815-1860. Oil on canvas

Collection of the University of Virginia Art Museum.

Just many like of us use the skills learned from our mothers even as adults, Meriwether Lewis utilized the medical knowledge gained from his mother, Lucy Meriwether Lewis Marks, on the Lewis and Clark Expedition. On the trip, Lewis served as not only a co-leader of the expedition, but also as the primary doctor and caregiver to the men under his command. Though not a formally trained doctor, Lewis studied for a short time with Benjamin Rush, a famous doctor living in Philadelphia. However, Lewis’s first teacher in medicine was his own mother.

Lucy Marks was known as a folk healer at her home in Virginia. Possibly skills learned from her father, Lucy used local herbs and plants with medicinal properties to treat patients. She performed this local caregiving even into old age. Lucy likely used some of these homespun cures to treat her children, including Meriwether Lewis. Lewis himself must have absorbed some of this knowledge too, as he used “simple” cures on the Lewis and Clark expedition.

While traveling through modern day Montana in June of 1805, Meriwether Lewis became ill and weak with a fever, even unable to eat or march with the rest of the Corps. Not having any medicine with him, Lewis decided to try an herbal remedy in the style of his mother. He wrote of the experience in his journal, “towards evening was attended with a high fever; finding myself unable to march, I determined to prepare a camp of some willow boughs and remain all night. having brought no medecine with me I resolved to try an experiment with some simples; and the Choke cherry which grew abundanly in the bottom first struck my attention; I directed a parsel of the small twigs to be geathered striped of their leaves, cut into pieces of about 2 Inches in length and boiled in water untill a strong black decoction of an astringent bitter tast was produced; [2] at sunset I took a point [pint] of this decoction and abut an hour after repeated the dze by 10 in the evening I was entirely releived from pain and in fact every symptom of the disorder forsook me; my fever abated, a gentle perspiration was produced and I had a comfortable and refreshing nights rest.” Putting his mother’s teaching to work certainly worked for Lewis in this instance!

Meriwether Lewis used the medical knowledge passed down by his mother Lucy Marks to good effect on the Lewis and Clark expedition. He treated not only the men under his command, but himself too. What knowledge or skills passed from your parents do you regularly use in your day to day life?