meme collection

They are those who would be sleepless the night before a dream job interview or a major exam - not to cram, not to worry, not to succumb to false optimism, but to plot success

What a title!?  Valuable Vegetable Medical Prescriptions: for the Cure of all Nervous and Putrid Disorders. This fantastic volume contains amazing recipes claiming to cure medical conditions that were perhaps not so well understood at the time. I DO NOT recommend recreating any of them. Reading about them on the other hand is a real pleasure.

“…or take a new laid egg and pour out the white and fill up the place with salt, and roast it hard; then beat it to a powder and take as much as will lay on the point of a case-knife, every half hour…”

The binding of this book has also been the recipient of some creative remedies. Above you can see where a loss in the the original leather was patched. The volumes has seen quite a lot in it’s lifetime including exposure to high humidity and perhaps some direct contact with an unknown liquid. 

When the recipe to treat “Bloody Flux” (dysentery) can either be anything from that powdered egg to “dried hog dung boiled in sweet milk” OR wine with grated rhubarb and nutmeg the stained pages certainly get the imagination going. 

While we won’t be able to do any analysis to attempt to get a clearer picture of what caused the staining we can reasonably infer something about how the book was used. Being a practical text, much like a modern cookbook, it is perhaps not surprising to see such wear and staining. After all this volume was more likely to be put to work than kept pristine in a personal library. In this case we will call it a result of use, where the term “use” covers a multitude of sins.