Note 112 — HISTORY (continued 2)

Ten years earlier a vogue for rattlesnake root had been established, apparently by those interested in promoting it. On June 16, 1738, Benjamin Waller wrote to the editor of the Virginia Gazette extolling the virtues of rattlesnake root in a testimonial. He claimed it cured him quickly of the gout, and, he wrote, “I am also fully convinced this Medicine has saved the Lives of many of my Negroes, and others in that Disease, which rages here, and is by many called a Pleurisy; And that it is a sure Cure in a Quartan Ague.” Two weeks later the Gazette carried “Proposals for Printing by Subscription a Treatise on the DISEASES of Virginia and the Neighbouring Colonies ... To which is annexed, An Appendix, showing the strongest Reasons, a priori, that the Seneca Rattle-Snake Root must be of more use than any Medicine in the Materia Medica.”