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This was no secret to his contemporaries. As part of his social ministry, Wesley himself manufactured and dispensed medicine at the Foundery. For this, Wesley was labeled a quack.
As one satirist wrote:
Tottenham's the best accustom'd Place,
There Magus squints men into Grace,
W-s-y sells Powders, Draughts, and Pills,
Sov'reign against all sorts of Ills.
Wesleyan theology has no grips on me any longer. But being follicularly challenged, I couldn't resist trying Wesley's cure for hair loss: "Rub the part morning and evening with onions, till it is red; and rub it afterwards with honey." After several attempts, all I wound up with were onion tears streaming down my face and a sticky raw forehead that attracted flies.
For lethargy, Wesley recommended "strong vinegar up the nose." And I must say, the vinegar certainly perked me up, as I spent several minutes gagging, spitting, and discharging my nasal cavity into a paper towel.
Primitive Physic: An Easy and Natural Method of Curing Most Diseases was Wesley's main tome on health, which he published in 1747. By its 24th edition, in 1792, the book included thousands of therapies, many of which Wesley tried himself, noting, sensibly, "Tried" after each. For example, his cure for an earache: "Put in a roasted fig, or onion, as hot as may be: Tried. Or, blow the smoke of tobacco strongly into it." And his cure for a toothache: "Be electrified through the teeth: Tried."
On the house tour, which begins in the basement kitchen, Betsy explains in a prim but exuberant British accent that only plain meals were prepared—"for Mr. Wesley decreed that all pickled, smoked, or salted food, and all high-seasoned, is unwholesome!"
Perfectly wholesome to Wesley, but grounds to expel the old man from most evangelical colleges in America, was relishing fine wines. "I remember how vexed he was," Rogers murmured in my ear, "when a case of claret shipped to him as a gift was seized by customs and, despite several written requests, was never released to him." To think—the man whose teachings form the doctrinal core of, for example, the teetotaling Church of the Nazarene, himself tippled with the devil.
But an even greater shock, so to speak, awaited me upstairs.
Against the rear wall in one room stood a contraption that looked like it belonged more in Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory than in the Reverend Mr. Wesley's study—his "personal electric-shock machine." He'd turn the crank on this crude device to generate a current of electricity through a metal rod, against which he'd press his tongue, forehead, or an ailing body part—a burn or a sore tooth, for example. In the postscript to Primitive Physic, Wesley wrote that of all his cures, "one, I must aver from personal knowledge, grounded on a thousand experiments, to be far superior to all other medicines I have known; I mean Electricity."
Wesley claimed electricity was "the nearest [to a] universal medicine of any yet known in the world" and maintained it could cure almost 50 ailments, from deafness and leprosy to stomachaches and even "feet violently disordered." When his brother, Charles, the famous composer of more than 6,000 hymns, lay on his deathbed, John "earnestly advised him to be electrified. Not shocked but only filled with electric fire." Understandably, Charles never roused himself long enough to undergo his brother's cure.
I refrain from criticizing Wesley for his superstitions about electric shock because I share his preoccupations utterly. I'm with him when he fell sick in 1753 and, convinced he would die any day of "consumption" at age 51, composed his own epitaph "to prevent vile panegyric." He went on to live another 38 years.
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