Taste of Life: A fruit that served as love charm & eating it guaranteed immortality
The late nineteenth century witnessed increasing consideration paid by the medical profession to the use of apples for medicinal purposes
In these days of indigestion,
Of fever and congestion,
A new and pleasant remedy has lately come to light;
‘Tis a cure-all pure and simple,
The very latest wrinkle-
Just eat a big round apple and you’ll be all right.
(Exchanger, September 1905)
The apple was an object of luxury for most of the twentieth-century Poona. “Foreign” fruits like apples, peaches, pears, and strawberries were so generally regarded as a symbol of opulence that their dietetic value as food was largely overlooked. Apple was a much-coveted novelty that appeared in the Poona markets from Kangra and other parts of Northern India in November- December. In 1904, according to the cookbook “Anglo-Indian Cuisine” by Lady Constance Gordon, apples cost ₹3 per dozen in Bombay and Poona. Only the rich could afford it.
Apples, in another form, the “silver apple,” were desired in early twentieth-century Poona. Known as “Chandiche safarchand” in Marathi, they were a “karada,” an apple-shaped casket made of metal and polished with silver, used to store vermillion powder or other such articles. They were gifted to newlywed brides or awarded to the winners of contests and competitions held especially for women.
The “chandiche safarchand” came in various sizes. The winner of a contest was of course awarded the largest silver apple, the size of a real apple while the second runner-up received the silver apple the size of a lemon.
The apple was a “miracle fruit” for several centuries. It occurred in countless myths and legends across the globe. It was a magical object that nourished people. It served as a love charm and eating it guaranteed immortality. In Arabian Nights, Prince Ahmed had apples that he had purchased at Samarkand and that cured every human ailment. In eighteenth-century Britain, “Prince Ahmed’s apple” referred to a cure for every disorder.
In 1878, the sanitarium at Poorandhur (Purandar) decided to include the “apple cure” in its list of therapies. The variety of kindred cures – the apple-cure, the peach-cure, the pear-cure, the plum-cure, the tomato-cure, the strawberry, raspberry, and blackberry-cures, the cranberry-cure, whortleberry-cure, the pumpkin and squash-cures, the sweet-corn and green peas-cures, and chestnut-cure were quite popular in Europe and its colonies.
The cranberry cure was for constipation; the tomato cure for biliousness; the lemon cure for rheumatism; the potato cure for scurvy; the cherry cure for dyspepsia, and the blackberry cure for diarrhoea. The “apple cure” was initially popular in many of the sanitariums of Germany, where alcoholic and narcotic patients were treated. A diet of apples and apple juice was provided for those who craved opium, alcohol, tobacco, and other narcotics.
The late nineteenth century witnessed increasing consideration paid by the medical profession to the use of apples for medicinal purposes. In an article published in the magazine “Physical Culture” (Vol 14, 1905), it was claimed that the apple was both a “refrigerant” and antiseptic; it disinfected the kidneys, mouth, and stomach, and for that reason was considered one of the best preventives of sore throat. In England and Germany, it was deemed potent against warts.
Dr John Hunter, a surgeon at St George’s Hospital in London in the late eighteenth century, was an enthusiastic advocate of the apple cure for gout. Instead of drinking wine and consuming quantities of rare roast beef, he enjoined upon his patients suffering from gout, the importance of the free use of apples in the place of wine-drinking, roast beef, mutton chop, etc.
Apple’s medicinal properties were attributed to phosphates by some doctors and to organic acids by others. Patients were recommended to take one after every meal, one first thing in the morning and one at bedtime.
However, there were detractors of apple and other fruit cures. These cures were often linked to “Christian Science” and doctors advised patients to not insist on eating fruits instead of “real medicines”. The “Buffalo Enquirer”, in August 1907, published an anecdote attributed to Mark Twain where he recounted how the “apple cure” was popular in his boyhood in the town of Hannibal, Missouri, where several drunkards swore by the efficacy of the cure by proudly claiming that it had helped them cure of drunkenness several times.
In Poona, apple was used to cure stye. Stye, or hordeolum, is an acute, painful infection of the eye which involves the upper or lower eyelid. It is caused by staphylococcal bacteria.
Rev EM Gordon, in his article “Notes concerning the people of Mungeli Tehsil, Bilaspore District” in 1905, recorded that there was a widespread belief at the beginning of the nineteenth century in the Central Provinces that styes were caused by seeing a dog in the act of defecating. It was customary there to take a grain of rice, apply it to the stye, and then throw it away. As the grain decayed the stye would disappear.
A similar belief was prevalent in Poona, as evident from an article published in the Marathi newspaper “Sudharak” on August 19, 1894. While criticizing the citizens of Poona for falling prey to various bogus “cures”, it mentioned, among several other superstitions, how faux remedies like rice grains and apples were used to cure stye. Thick slices of apple were roasted on fire and tied to the infected eye.
Apples appeared in Greek and Roman mythology where it was a symbol of fertility and courtship. In a paper contributed to The British Journal of Medical Psychology (Vol XIX, pp 37-55), WI Inman gave several examples of the couvade (a group of rituals and practices that fathers may observe during pregnancy and after birth in some cultures) in modern England. He suggested that styes and tarsal cysts – both of which were “affections of the glands of the eyelids – were often associated in “some mysterious way” with thoughts and fantasies about birth. He recalled “the trifling bit of a folklore about the efficacy of the application of a gold wedding-ring as a cure for styes”, that there was “some causal relationship between styes and menstruation, which after all is only a missed pregnancy.”
In several parts of Western India, stye was associated with fertility and birth. Its “cure” included aphrodisiacs like saffron, nutmeg, menstrual blood, and egg whites. Such cures were attractive because saffron, menstrual blood, egg white, or apples, were either a luxury or a taboo, making them eligible to be categorized as exotic and expensive, and hence, effective medicines. No wonder several young men sneaked out at night to buy the golden feathers of a hen from a butcher because it was believed that burning the golden feathers of a hen in bed cured fever.
European doctors in the twentieth century advised that the stye boil be frequently well fomented with hot water or with hot milk and water, permitted to come to a head, and then pricked with a lancet to let the matter out, instead of applying blood or apple to the infection. But this was looked at as the marginalization of indigenous system by the colonists by several men like one Trimbak Nana Oak, who, in a letter in the evening edition of “Dnyanaprakash” on March 14, 1948, mentioned that traditional cures like the apple, basil, milk, spices, amla, rose apple, grapes, pomegranate, and aloe vera were being sidelined by the “educated class” for “English medicines” that were costly and ineffective. His letter was a response to an advertorial for “Mendaco”, a medicine for asthma. The advertisement lampooned the use of apples and chicken feathers to cure stye and fever respectively. While taking up the case for traditional cures, Oak sidelined the fact that apple cultivation in India had begun in the early 1830s and the fruit was not available in Indian markets on a large scale till the early twentieth century.
The close connection of health and concepts of illness with cultural beliefs has made medical acculturation one of the less easily introduced technological changes in a traditional society. While the intelligentsia expects complete and unambivalent support for modern medicine, it is interesting to study how traditional pre-scientific systems of medicine continued to find strong support among the modernizing elite.
Chinmay Damle is a research scientist and food enthusiast. He writes here on Pune’s food culture. He can be contacted at chinmay.damle@gmail.com
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