Our Heritage

Growing up in the Appalachian Mountains of Southwest Virginia, I often heard adults speak of how plants could be used to heal people and animals, but it always felt more like folklore than reality to me. Like so many of us, my family's use of plants as medicine had been abandoned for conventional modern medicine, and generations of knowledge was lost along with it. Thus, I was elated when a small piece of my own medicinal plant heritage was recently provided to me in the form of hand-written notes by my great aunt describing her, and my maternal grandfather's grandmother and great-great-grandmother who made their home in nearby West Virginia:

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"Dicia Wilcox Trivette was a skilled Herb Doctor in the days following the Civil War, when there were no Medical Doctors in the area, she served her family and the people quite well. 

Her granddaughter, Virginia Elizabeth Trivette, called Betty, spent much time with her grandmother, helping her and all the while learning from her. She walked with her in the fields, and the woods gathering her roots and herbs which she processed herself into medications. She also became the mid-wife in her community and delivered many babies. 

Grandma Betty retained this knowledge of how to gather and prepare medications from roots, herbs, wildflowers, seeds, and ooze and bark of certain trees. Betty also learned some very excellent nursing procedures from her Grandmother Dicie, like sanitary rules strictly enforced on the farm or in home. Isolation technique in cases of communicable diseases. For example, Dicie's daughter-in-law, Alice Todd Trivette, died at age 26 with T.B., and not one other member of her family caught it. When Betty's adult son, Luke, came home with Typhoid Fever, she alone nursed and attended him; carried out and dug a deep hole for all of his body excretions being careful that they were dug where the run off would not contaminate any stream of water. Not another member of her family got Typhoid either! 

Dicie was careful to prevent "Child Bed Fever" which so many women died of following childbirth. She also treated female disorders and complications following delivery for some women. What a pity these things have all been lost to us with her passing."

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It is also noted that the local "Regular Doctor" had left strict instructions that should he ever fall ill, the only person allowed to attend to him was "Doc Betty Trivette".

 

I am happy and humbled to know that I am not the first Doctor's doctor in the family. Thank you, Dicie & Betty =)

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Jennifer A. Cann, DVM, PhD, MS, DACVP 

Comparative Pathologist & Clinical Herbalist