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Tales from the Archives

Tales from the Archives — A Plant for the End of the World

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As I sift through materials for my own research on manuals and strategies for famine prevention, I’ve had to spend a lot of time thinking about plants. The near-obsession with the healing properties of plants pervades premodern East Asia, not just in the pharmacological sense but in nourishing one’s moral character.

When recording a book of recipes to stave off starvation, at least in the Japanese case, authors resorted to ingredients at the edge of edibility: fibrous stalks and wild roots, pulped tree bark, the scum from the bottom of your neighbor’s used rice pot. Yet they were equally concerned with spiritual upkeep as they were with bodily preservation.

Why?

So, I went digging through our own archives here at The Recipes Project and, to my great delight, discovered Michael Stanley-Baker’s contribution on botanicals for sustenance and salvation in premodern China: “A Plant for the End of the World.” I hope it sates your appetite for pondering plants too, or at least whets it.

By Michael Stanley-Baker

Atractylodes chinensis (DC.) 蒼朮, from the Jiuhuang bencao 救荒本草 (Materia Medica for Surviving Famine) 1.101a
Atractylodes chinensis (DC.) 蒼朮, from the Jiuhuang bencao 救荒本草 (Materia Medica for Surviving Famine, pub. 1525) 1.101a

Located in his mountain retreat near the Floriate Sunlight Cavern on Mount Mao, China’s earliest recorded pharmacologist, Tao Hongjing, is deep in his studies. He is editing the earliest known recension of the Chinese Pharmacopoeia, the Divine Husbandman’s Pharmacopoeia (Shennong bencao jing 神農本草經). It is about the year 500, and Tao is also compiling a collection of manuscripts, sacred revelations to a local family, the Xus 許 of Jurong, revealed to them over 130 years earlier. Collectively titled the Declarations of the Perfected (Zhen’gao 真誥), they cover all manner of topics that interested the Xus, from personal salvation, bodily cure, the contours of the underworld, to the political careers of their friends who had died and passed over into the bureaucracies of the afterlife. One manuscript in this collection celebrates a plant native to the Mao mountains, the herb atractylodes, cangzhu 蒼朮.  It describes not only the medical properties of the plant but an entire array of health-related and salvific practices. It is revealed by the Goddess, the Lady of Purple Tenuity, Ziwei Wang furen 紫微王夫人, whose title refers to the canopy of heaven surrounding the pole star. This manuscript, copied in the hand of the younger of the two Xu brothers, Xu Hui 許翽, is titled Discourse on Eating Atractylodes (Fu zhu xu 服朮序).  It begins at the end of time, with the apocalypse that was predicted for the year 392. In succeeding layers, the Lady of Purple Tenuity describes different practices for dealing with the disease, warfare and famine to come.

Excerpt from reconstructed Mawangdui Daoyin tu, excavated from tomb dated to 168 BCE. Wellcome Images
Excerpt from reconstructed Mawangdui Daoyin tu, excavated from tomb dated to 168 BCE.
Wellcome Images

There are massage and breathing exercises which nourish vitality (yangsheng 養生) to ensure robust health while drawing meditative awareness to the interior of the body.  These circulate qi and activate divine beings in the body.1 Other similar repertoires from this period further included daoyin 導引 stretching like those pictured here, sexual cultivation, and diet.

Visualisation of the dipper stars descending into the adept's body, and returning, bringing the adept with them.
Visualisation of the dipper stars descending into the adept’s body, and returning, bringing the adept with them. 上 清金闕帝君五斗三一圖訣.

The Lady of Purple Tenuity goes on to describe the next phase of practice, in which the adept visualizes starry gods of the dipper and other asterisms as celestial bureaucrats, inviting them to take up residence in the body. These visualizations anthropomorphize the bodily awareness of earlier breathing meditations, and match the body with the movements of the stars, of the seasons, of the five phases.  Then come fantastic alchemicals, beyond material making or financial access, which stretch the imagination and aspiration:

Tiger spittle, phoenix brain, white cornelian, jade frost, lunar liquor of the Grand Bourne, thrice-cycled numinous steel.  If you offer up a knife-point’s worth, your divine feathery wings will spread wide. Opening up the supreme writs of the void-like cavern, you will blaze in glory in the chamber of the primordial beginning…2

Visualisation of Cranial Gods. 上清金書玉字上經
Visualisation of Cranial Gods. 上清金書玉字上經

Finally, Lady Wang lays out the highest levels of practice: oration of the Great Cavern Scripture (Dadong zhenjing 大洞真經), and the other supreme texts of the tradition. These install supreme deities throughout the body, grant immortality and ascension to the highest layers of heaven. They will cause the 5 organs to flourish and thrive and guard and close the mysterious portal [between the eyes]. Visualize the nine perfected [beings] within the brain and the three qi will transport fluids [through the body] and irrigate the elixir field.3

Only then, Lady Wang begins to discuss plants:

One can add [to one’s lifespan] with the five micas, water cassia, atractylodes root, polygonatum, Lyonia Ovalifolia, sunflower, eastern stone, malachite, oily pine nuts, sesame, poria. These are all tools for cultivating life; using them can lengthen your years. I have completely investigated the successes and failures of trees and herbs. There are those which quickly benefit to oneself, but none equal the many proofs of the power of Atractylodes.4

It is here where she reveals that atractylodes, alone among all others, can dispel ghost-borne diseases at the millennial climax. The plant among plants, it is the key to survival in the end times.

Eat this potent herb to care for your health, swallow the floriate springs of clear rivers; study the secret instructions concerning mysterious wonders, and intone hidden texts of the most high. If you do this nesting high in mountain caves, you’ll be able to talk of your years in the same terms as metal and stone.5

This is not just a recipe for making a drug, it is a recipe for life, for salvation. Three recipes using atractylodes appear elsewhere in the Declarations as separate documents. They each describe technical details of boiling, sieving and pulping the root, frying it with wine or mixing it with honey, jujubes or pine nuts.  Other passages in Tao’s collection show that the Xu family were taking atractylodes for different reasons: Xu Mi 許謐 the father, was taking it for his semi-paralysed arm. the youngest of his three sons, Xu Hui 許翽 was taking it to prepare his digestive system for austere ascetic diets where he would give up food entirely to live on herbs or just qi. But why articulate atractylodes into this larger program?  Giving it this special meaning bound up the Xus with the sacredness of the mountains on which it grew. During the cataclysm the Mao mountains were to be the site where the Lord of the Dao from on High would descend to save the worthy. The Xus chances of being saved depended on two kinds of merit.  Firstly, the merit gained from persevering in their spiritual practices and achieving bio-spiritual transformation .  However, their access to these practices was due to the merits of their ancestor, Xu Ah, who compassionately dispensed drugs and food in the region during epidemic and famine.  The salvific qualities of Atractylodes brought these two together, binding their elite heritage, and their spiritual practice, their past and their future, into a direct relationship with the land, the mountains and the local ecology of medicinal herbs. The very mountain where the Xus were destined to be saved was the same site Tao Hongjing had chosen for his own editorial efforts, both of the Declarations, and the Pharmacopoeia.  

What of the Lady of Purple Tenuity’s knowledge of actractyldoes travelled into Tao’s Pharmacopoeia, written for the emperor, and intended for exoteric transmission outside? The eschatology, the other practices, the Xus disappear in that work. The pharmacopoeic format is regular and predictable, each entry proceeding with the drug’s name, flavours, temperature, toxicity, major functions and so on. Atractylodes is reported useful here for blockage syndrome in the limbs, which was Xu Mi’s condition, and for digestive problems, which correlates to Xu Lian’s fasting. Furthermore, Tao’s annotations report that “Transcendent Scriptures say” that it can suppress epidemic poxes and disperse evil qi, codewords for ghostly diseases, echoing the claims of the Discourse. Do these separate collections indicate broader cultural distinctions between religion and medicine, between recipes and pharmacopoeias, between local and centralized, or esoteric and exoteric knowledge?

1 On Shangqing massage techniques and their relationship to self-divinization see Michael Stanley-Baker, “Palpable Access to the Divine: Daoist Medieval Massage, Visualisation and Internal Sensation” Asian Medicine 7 (2012): 101-127. On the broader project, see here.

2 虎沫鳳腦，雲琅玉霜，太極月醴，三環靈剛。若以刀圭奏矣，神羽翼張，乃披空同之上文，煒燁元始之室。Declarations of the Perfected (Zhen’gao 真誥), Tao Honging ed.,DZ DZ 1016,  6.2b.

3 使五藏生華，守閉元關內存九真，三氣運液，而灌溉丹田。 Ibid., 6.3a-b.

4 乃可加以五雲   、水桂，朮根，黄精，南燭，陽草，東石，空青，松柏，脂實，巨勝，茯苓。竝養生之具。將可以長年矣。吾   又倶察草木之勝負。有速益於己者，竝未及朮勢之多驗乎。 Ibid., 6.3b. 5 餌靈朮以頤生，漱華泉於清川；研玄妙之祕   訣，誦太上之隱篇。於是高栖于峯岫，竝金石   而論年耶。  Ibid., 6.5b.

Tales from the Archives

Tales from the Archives: GENERAL GEORGE WASHINGTON, HAIRDRESSER

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The Recipes Project has over 800 posts in our archives and over 200 pages for readers to sift through. That’s a lot of material! With so much excellent material on the site, it’s easy for earlier pieces to be forgotten. Tales from the Archive allows us to revisit some of these older posts, reminding us of some of our wonderful past content.

This month we’re sharing a wonderful 2016 post by Zara Anishanslin. It explores the importance of personal grooming and hygiene in George Washington’s army, including the recipes used to maintain soldiers’ appearances. We hope that you enjoy this latest instalment from our Recipes Project archives, and if you have any posts that you’d like for us to revisit, please send in your nominations!

 

By Zara Anishanslin 

General George Washington, stationed with the Continental Army in Newburgh, New York, was concerned about his troops. More specifically, he was bothered by their looks. It was August of 1782, and the men had recently followed his orders to spruce up their clothing and hats. But Washington still felt there was still something lacking in their appearance.

The remaining problem, in Washington’s opinion, was the men’s hair. To present the proper “martial and uniform appearance,” the soldiers needed to wear their “hair cut or tied in the same manner.” Doing so, as he put it, “would add much to the beauty” of the army.

To beautify his army, Washington wrote a recipe:

two pounds of flour and one-half pound of rendered tallow per hundred men may be drawn from the contractors for dressing the hair.[1]

By flour, of course, Washington meant the light-colored, edible powder made by grinding a grain like wheat and then used for making dough or bread. Throughout the war, flour was an omnipresent necessity on the Continental Army’s ration lists. Along with flour, beef was also a ubiquitous ration item. Rendered tallow’s base ingredient was beef fat, or suet. Rendered tallow could be used for a variety of purposes, from frying food to making candles and soap.

In this case, the tallow would smooth back the soldiers’ hair, providing a sticky base to hold the flour that would then be shaken or puffed onto it. Once stuck to the men’s hair, the flour’s dry powder would lighten it into a more uniform color while keeping it stiffly in place.

Washington’s recipe for beautifying the Continental Army, in other words, was pulverized grain and congealed animal fat.

Portrait of George Washington [in Continental Army uniform] by John Trumbull (1780), oil on canvas. Bequest of Charles Allen Munn, 1924, acc. no. 24.109.88, Image Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Portrait of George Washington [in Continental Army uniform] by John Trumbull (1780), oil on canvas. Bequest of Charles Allen Munn, 1924, acc. no. 24.109.88, Image Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In ordering supplies for the men to smooth and powder their hair, Washington was also dictating that they mimic his own grooming habits. Unlike some other officers in the British, French, and American armies, Washington did not wear a wig. Instead, as his portraits record, his habit was to wear his own hair tied back and powdered.

Washington, however, did not do his own hair. His enslaved valet William “Billy” Lee (also pictured in the Trumbull portrait), or the servant of one of Washington’s aide-de-camp’s dressed it for him.  After brushing it, applying a pomade, and tying it back, Washington’s hair was powdered, using a tool like this puff.

High quality pomades like that used by Washington were made of rendered tallow and—to counteract smells as it went rancid over time—perfumed with fragrances like bergamot, bay leaf, rosewood, or rosewater. Powder, too, although made of ingredients like flour and dried white clay that were less likely to spoil, was also commonly perfumed, with scents like nutmeg, ambergris, rose, or lavender. Perfume and quality aside, the recipe Washington ordered for dressing his army’s hair was not that different from what he used himself.

Still, there is evidence that not all the troops shared their commander’s enthusiasm for powdered hair. Earlier in the war, Continental Army officer Anthony Wayne

observ’d with a good deal of Pain that some of the Regiments have sent their men to the Parade with unpowder’d Hair, long Beards, dirty shirts, and rusty Arms.       

“Fantastic Hairdress with Fruit and Vegetable Motif,“ Anonymous, French, 18th century, Watercolor on canvas laid down on board. Bequest of Rosina H. Hoppin, 1965, acc.no. 65.692.8. Image Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“Fantastic Hairdress with Fruit and Vegetable Motif,“ Anonymous, French, 18th century, Watercolor on canvas laid down on board. Bequest of Rosina H. Hoppin, 1965, acc.no. 65.692.8. Image Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Wayne issued soap and even excused troops from duty so they could appear “fresh shav’d, clean, and well powder’d at troop beating.” For his concern over the troops’  grooming, and his fastidiousness about his own hygiene and hair, Wayne earned the disparaging nickname of “Dandy Wayne.” [2] Painstakingly groomed hair for both men and women was an easy satirical target in the late eighteenth century. Military men like Wayne were not exempt from such attacks.

Satirical humor aside, the variety of pragmatic possibilities flour and tallow held beyond hairdressing may explain why some troops might have been inclined to use these rations for things other than their coiffures. A few months after his general orders for powdering the troops’ hair, Washington wrote of his officers’ “Mortification” at not being able to “invite a French Officer” to “a better Repast than stinkg Whiskey (& not always that) & a bit of Beef without Vegitable.”

“Count de Rochambeau, French General of the Land Forces in America Reviewing the French Troops,” Anonymous, British, 18th century, published by E. Hedges (London, 1781), Engraving. Gift of William H. Huntington, 1883, acc. no. 83.2.1039. Image Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“Count de Rochambeau, French General of the Land Forces in America Reviewing the French Troops,” Anonymous, British, 18th century, published by E. Hedges (London, 1781), Engraving. Gift of William H. Huntington, 1883, acc. no. 83.2.1039. Image Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

 

These visiting French officers likely would have worn wigs or powdered their hair to attend such meals, no matter how poor the fare.  American officers like Washington wished to keep up appearances of all sorts when they entertained the French. At the same time, American enlisted men might well have preferred putting edible hairdressing ingredients in their bellies rather than on their heads. Washington was wise to this potential; officers were required to keep a tally of who used these rations, and to vouch on a “certificate of use” that they were, in fact, used to groom hair.

 

[1] General Order of General George Washington, August 12, 1782, Head Quarters at Newburgh, New York, in General Orders of Geo. Washington Commander-in-Chief of the Army of the Revolution Issued at Newburgh on the Hudson 1782-1783 (Newburgh, NY: News Company, 1909), 35.

[2] Kathleen M. Brown, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (Yale University Press, 2009), 178, 168.

Tales from the Archives

Tales From the Archives: A Recipe for Disaster: How Not to Distill Turpentine

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In September 2018, The Recipes Project will be six years old. There’s been a lot of blogging on this platform, and we are so grateful to all our wonderful contributors. But with so much material on the site, it’s easy for earlier pieces to be forgotten. So, the editors have decided that, once a month, we’ll pull something out of the archives to share with our readers anew.

This month, I have chosen a piece written by Tillamann Taape. In this post, first published in July 2013, Tillmann writes vividly about alchemical disasters. Heat, unsurprisingly, comes into play. Enjoy!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

By Tillmann Taape

When sifting through early modern alchemical recipes, I am often struck by their inherent dangers which would make modern-day health and safety officers pull their hair out. Renaissance practitioners were remarkably unfazed by temperatures high enough to melt glass and metal, and they frequently recommended heating volatile and flammable liquid in sealed glass vessels which, by their own admission, had a tendency to crack if not handled with the utmost care. Surely these exploits must have gone wrong a lot of the time, resulting in burnt fingers or a faceful of boiling alcohol?

If we look at the stereotype of the alchemist in contemporary satirical literature, it seems that accidents came with the job. In his Ship of Fools (1494), German humanist and satirist Sebastian Brant echoes themes from medieval poetry in his depiction of the alchemist: a greedy and reckless fool whose dangerous and fruitless exploits leave him scarred, financially ruined and even blind. [1] As a source of historical information, satirical genres should of course be taken with a generous pinch of salt. It is significant to note, though, that early modern people saw alchemy as a potentially dangerous thing to do, even in times long before anything like today’s health and safety standards.

More direct evidence of alchemical disasters is, unfortunately, fairly rare. I would of course be delighted to be persuaded otherwise by readers of this blog, but to me it seems that while adepts of alchemy frequently wrote down instructions which sound like they might well blow up, they were frustratingly silent on whether this actually happened. I was quite thrilled, therefore, when I finally stumbled upon a first-hand account of an alchemical disaster: exploding stills, knocked-out practitioners and all. In his 700-page tome entitled Liber de arte distillandi de compositis or Large book of distillation, first published in 1512, my favourite surgeon-apothecary Hieronymus Brunschwig (introduced here and here) includes the following cautionary tale.

Brunschwig was distilling turpentine to separate the watery fraction from the valuable oil, and when nearly all of the water had come out, he was interrupted.

 I was called away to a patient, so the oil went into the water, and when I came back, a layer of oil was sitting on top of the water. I didn’t have the sense to simply decant off the oil, so I poured the lot into a new flask and thought I’d just extract the water by distillation. But I was called away again, and in the meantime the water evaporated from the oil, and some of it condensed on the side of the flask and dripped back into the oil, which rose inside the flask with a great tumult, and fumes erupted from the flask, blowing off the alembic. [2]

 A lot to handle: picture of a still from Brunschwig’s Large book of distillation. © Wellcome Images

A lot to handle: picture of a still from Brunschwig’s Large book of distillation.
© Wellcome Images

Things got worse when Brunschwig came back late at night and went to investigate the accident, telling his servant to bring along a light:

When the light arrived, the fumes touched it, and fire burst forth all around, and in the blink of an eye went out again, nevertheless burning off mine and my servant’s hair, clothes and eyebrows. We fell to the ground and did not know where we were, but before long we got up again and fetched a closed lantern so the same thing would not happen again, and threw ashes in the furnace to smother the fire. [2]

And this, dear readers of the Large book of distillation, is how you do NOT distill turpentine! Once the initial excitement about this truly adventurous tale had worn off, I realised that, to the historian, there was more to this anecdote than merely the satisfying confirmation that some procedures which look so precarious on paper did indeed go up in fire and smoke. In his description of this extraordinary incident, Brunschwig also reveals a number of interesting details about his everyday life and work. We get a glimpse of what it meant for an early modern practitioner to have multiple vocations. Juggling his alchemical activities with his duties as an apothecary and surgeon, it seems that Brunschwig could be called away to the aid of a patient at a moment’s notice, even at night. We also learn that he had at least one servant, and we can surmise that he did his distillations in an enclosed workshop, since a buildup of explosive fumes would be unlikely in the open air. Perhaps most importantly of all, this anecdote provides strong evidence that Brunschwig was actively performing many of the procedures he describes in his works, rather than just copying and compiling them for publication.

Anecdotes like these, then, are more than just an entertaining read and a well-earned reward for ploughing through hundreds of pages of Brunschwig’s Alsatian dialect with its erratic spelling. Descriptions of extraordinary events also grant us a glimpse into the reality of practicing alchemy, and into practitioners’ everyday life.

[1] On the stereotypes and changing ‘personae’ of early modern alchemists, see Tara Nummedal,  Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007, Ch. 2.

[2] Brunschwig, Hieronymus. Liber de arte distillandi de compositis […]. Strasbourg: Grüninger, 1512.

 

Tales from the Archives

Tales from the Archives: A Bag of Worms: Treating the Sick Child in Early Modern England, 1580-1720

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In September 2016, The Recipes Project celebrated its fourth birthday. We now have over 500 posts in our archives and over 120 pages for readers to sift through. That’s a lot of material! (And thank you so much to our contributors for sharing such a wealth of knowledge on recipes.) But with so much material on the site, it’s easy for earlier pieces to be forgotten. So, the editors have decided that, every now and then, we’ll pull something out of the archives to share with our readers anew.

This month I’d like to share a 2013 post by Hannah Newton.  I hope that you enjoy it! And if you have any favorites you want us to revisit, please send in your nominations…
AH (editor)

*****

By Hannah Newton

Parents today are all too familiar with the problem of worms in children. Tiny, threadlike creatures, they cause terrible itching. How did parents in the past respond to this common childhood complaint? In the following paragraphs, I use early modern collections of medical recipes, doctors’ casebooks, and medical treatises, to find some answers.

L0016479: Karl Asmund Rudolphi, ‘Entozoorum sive vermium intestinalium histor’: courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

Worms were defined as ‘Annimals generated in the body, variously hurting the Operations of the Body’.[1] Growing out of rotting food in the stomach, these creatures were ‘deservedly reckoned among those Diseases which frequently afflict Infants and Children, seldom…troubling people of Years’.[2] The reason, according to the physician John Pechey, was that ‘Children eat greedily, and are delighted with…sweet things’, such as summer fruits and candied cherries, foods which easily putrefy and ‘nourissheth and fedeth’ the worms.[3] Children’s bodies provided worms with the ideal conditions to grow, because they were thought to be more moist and warm than adults, qualities which promoted putrefaction.[4]

The symptoms of worms were well known. ‘Worms are known to be in a Body’, stated Daniel Sennert in 1664, ‘when there is much spittle and a stinking breath, troublesom sleep, gnashing of teeth, crying and bawling’.[5] If the infestation continued over a long period, the patient became emaciated, as Walter Harris observed in his casebook: his thirteen-year-old patient ‘was much liker a Skeleton than a live Boy: His Face was like that of one raised from the Grave, his Eyes hollow; his Nose sharp, and his bones only covered with skin’. The child’s ‘ratling joynts’ could scarcely ‘carry him from one end of the room to another with the swiftness of a Snail’, lamented Harris.[6]

Wellcome Library, MS 1340 (Katherine Jones, Collection of medical receipts, c. 1675-1710), f.87v. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

How were children treated? ‘A special regard’, declared John Pechey in 1697, ‘is to be had to the Methods and Medicines, for Children by reason of the weakness of their bodies, cannot undergo severe methods or strong Medicines’.[7] Instead of using the usual remedies of the day – vomits, purges, and bloodletting – children were to be treated with milder medicines, such as ointments and suppositories.

Medical texts and manuscript collections of remedies are replete with recipes to remove worms. In 1664, the doctor ‘J.S.’ prescribed suppositories made of honey, by which ‘the Worms [are] drawn by sweetnesse, [to] the lower parts of the Guts’, where they could be voided by natural defecation.[8] Like children, worms loved sweet things, and could be tempted out of the body this way.

Wellcome Library, MS 1340 (Katherine Jones, Collection of medical receipts, c. 1675-1710), f.87v. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

Other, more bizarre treatments were recommended. In the late 1600s, Lady Mary Dacres suggested the following ‘rare thing for Wormes in…children’: ‘Tak[e] five live earth worms…sew them up in a piece of muslin, and lay them upon the navill’.[9] The London gentlewoman Katherine Jones suggested a similar remedy: she instructed, ‘Take Earth worms’, and put them ‘in a linnen bag, and bind the bag to the navel of the Child all night’.[10] It is not clear how these treatments were thought to work, but it is possible that people believed there existed a sympathy between similar creatures, so that when the earthworms died, so too did the worms in the child’s body.

Whilst early modern medicines might seem odd to modern eyes, it is clear that doctors were motivated by compassion. Francis Glisson noted in 1651 that he wished to make his remedies ‘grateful & pleasing to the sick Child’.[11] Clearly, children were regarded as different from adults, and in need of special medical treatment.

Occasionally children’s own thoughts leave a trace in the sources. In 1650, the Essex clergyman Ralph Josselin recorded in his diary the words of his eight-year-old daughter Mary, who was suffering from worms: she pointed to her tummy, and cried, ‘poore I poore I’. Five days later Mary died. [12]

Dr Hannah Newton is Wellcome Trust Fellow at the University of Cambridge, and the author of The Sick Child in Early Modern England, 1580-1720 (OUP, 2o12). Her current research project is about recovery from illness in the early modern period.

[1] J.S., Paidon nosemata; or childrens diseases both outward and inward (London, 1664), 167.

[2] Franciscus Sylvius, Dr. Franciscus de le Boe Sylvius of childrens diseases…also a treatise of the rickets (London, 1682), 127.

[3] John Pechey, A general treatise of the diseases of infants and children (London, 1697), 119. Thomas Phaer, ‘“The Booke of Children: The Regiment of Life by Edward Allde” (London, 1596, first publ. 1544)’, in John Ruhrah (ed.), Pediatrics of the Past (New York, 1925), 157-95, at 182.

[4] Nicholas Culpeper, Culpeper’s directory for midwives: or, a guide for women . . . the diseases and symptoms in children (1662), 239.

[5] Daniel Sennert, Practical physick the fourth book in 3 parts: section 2: of diseases and symptoms in children (London, 1664), 259.

[6] Walter Harris, An exact enquiry into, and cure of the acute diseases of infants, trans. William Cockburn (London, 1693), 129.

[7] Pechey, A general treatise, 15.

[8] J.S. Paidon nosemata, 172-3.

[9] British Library, Additional MS 56248 (Lady Mary Dacres, ‘Recipe Book…for cookery and domestic medicine, 1666-96’), 59v.

[10] Wellcome Library, MS 1340 (Katherine Jones, Collection of medical receipts, c. 1675-1710) 87v.

[11] Francis Glisson et al, A treatise of the rickets being a diseas common to children, trans. Philip Armin (London, 1651), 344.

[12] Ralph Josselin, The Diary of Ralph Josselin 1616–1683, ed. Alan Macfarlane (Oxford, 1991), 201