Mother Aubert’s Remedies
Suzanne Aubert was trained in the hospitals and nursing sisterhoods of Paris alongside Florence Nightingale. At the time, French Catholic sisterhoods such as the Sisters of Charity (where both Aubert and Nightingale trained) were internationally renowned for the quality and dedication of their nurses. Nightingale herself had to go to France to train because of the poor quality of nursing education in England, and as a result, she went on to revolutionise the systematic training of professional nurses. Aubert’s pedigree as a nurse was thus very strong, and in addition, she brought knowledge of herbalism, chemistry, and medicine to her role as a healer. These skills informed her approach to the indigenous medicinal plants of New Zealand, which were largely unexplored by Europeans:
When she came to New Zealand, Suzanne quickly applied her knowledge of chemistry and botany to experimenting with medicines. It is not certain that she was using native plants in Auckland but it is very likely. From 1862 she was largely in the company of Maori women, and she had Peata, a woman of mana who, she said, ‘taught her everything’, and the other Maori novices and pupils to advise her. From early in her time in Hawke’s Bay she was regularly seen with Maori women, gathering roots, barks, leaves, and plants across the hills and swamps. Women could be recognised as tohunga makutu in their specialised areas of knowledge and gifts, and healing was one of these. (Munro, 202)
Mother Aubert’s remedies were based on a synthesis of European herbalism and Maori rongoa, employing both native and non-native botanicals. On the European side, Aubert grew out of the Early Modern “great age of herbals”, in which folk herbalism flourished into a popular literary genre in vernacular languages, often still imbued with its magical, astrological, and alchemical resonances despite the formalisation of pharmacology as a scientific discipline. On the Maori side, her active engagement with indigenous women gave her direct access to their native herbal practices, which, as Munro remarks, could be recognised as tohunga makutu, an expression which is useful to unpack. Tohunga means “skilled person, expert, priest, healer”, and often referred to a leader in a particular field chosen due to their recognised talent. Makutu means “witchcraft, magic, sorcery”, and a tohunga makutu is thus an expert in magical practices (which frequently employed the powers of herbs).
The term tohunga makutu was more or less synonymous with tohunga whaiwhaiā, and oddly enough, both terms refer specifically to the magical ability to cause harm and even death. At least, this is the definition that the lexicons emphasise, and it appears to be consistent with Maori values of makutu as criminal acts punishable by death. What is important to note, however, is that in most magical traditions, the ability to harm is intimately linked to the ability to heal. They are essentially two sides of the same coin, and if the lexical definitions at our disposal reflect a stark moral one-sidedness, it is helpful to keep the deeper complexities of the wider phenomenon in mind. As is evident from the great body of scholarship on the history and anthropology of magic, the art is essentially instrumental, i.e., it is neither inherently good or evil, merely effective, like science or technology. It is the use to which it is put—towards socially sanctioned aims or towards non-socially sanctioned aims—that determines its moral value within the culture in question. In many cultures, this was reflected in a distinction between ritual practices that were openly sanctioned for communal purposes and supported by the spiritual authorities of the culture (usually referred to as “religion”), and ritual practices that were enacted privately for personal purposes often using spiritual authorities unsanctioned by the culture (usually referred to as “magic”). The former was valued and venerated, the latter mistrusted and maligned. On the background to this term, see especially Paterson, Lachy. “Government, Church and Māori Responses to Mākutu (Sorcery) in New Zealand in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries”, Cultural and Social History, 8.2 (2011), 175–194.
“The general feeling among Maori and from the documentation” remarks Munro, “is that Mother Aubert was not so much a mystical healer but as a skilful doctor who used, respected and added to the knowledge of the vegetation they knew, and brought to her cures and to her nursing all the power of her own faith and prayer”. “Her gift was to provide good medicine, common sense, laughter, friendship, and love in a holistic view of life and health where intense spirituality was all round”. (Munro, 207).
Before she founded her order at Jerusalem, Aubert acquired farmland at Hiruharama in 1888 in order to grow crops for the sisters. It was here that she began developing her remedies into commercial products to help further support the mission. Mother Aubert’s remedies subsequently became known throughout the country. They bore distinct colourful labels, with Maori-like names such as Wanena “for cuts and bruises”, Paramo “for liver complaints”, Marupa “for influenza, whooping cough”, and Natanata “a splendid medicine”. The labels inform us that the remedies were “purely vegetable” and that they were “prepared only and exclusively by herself under her personal supervision”.
One of the crops she developed at Hiruharama was “Indian hemp”, or cannabis, which she used for medicinal purposes (e.g. in tea to assuage menstrual cramps). While the exact ingredients of her medicines have never been revealed—due in part to the dramatic secrecy she created around them—it is likely that her commercial remedies included cannabis. It should be emphasised here that cannabis was not illegal at the time, and that her use likely drew on European herbal traditions of medicinal use. Ironically, the act that would criminalise cannabis in New Zealand came to pass in 1927, the year after she died.
In 1993, the Herbal Remedy (Rongoā) Analysis Project was initiated to analyse the medicines that remained. The project also reconnected the Sisters of Compassion with hapū from Hawkes’s Bay and Peata’s (Suzanne’s mentor in all things Māori, including medicinal lore, was Peata Hoki, an influential relative of the powerful Ngāpuhi chief, Rewa. She had been baptised by Bishop Pompallier in 1840, shortly before the Treaty of Waitangi was signed, and became a Sister of the Holy Family) home area in the Bay of Islands, where Suzanne had earlier gained knowledge of rongoā, as well as from Ngāti Hau and Ngāti Ruaka on the Whanganui River.
In 1999, Aubert was recognised by the New Zealand Biotechnology Heritage Award as “the first person to successfully combine Māori and Western medicines into products and to commercially extract New Zealand native plants, the first woman to launch a commercial biotechnology process in New Zealand, and the first to export such a product”.