Recipes for animals: husbandry and animal medicine in early modern England...
By Dr Leah Astbury One group of actors has been relatively neglected in scholarship on early modern recipe books: non-human animals. And yet, farmyard animals were also members of the household-family,...
View ArticleHouse of the Dragon and The RP
By Jess Clark I know, I know – 2023 is not the Summer of Dragons. Most of you have moved on from the battle for the Iron Throne, although maybe not the negroni…sbagliotos…with Prosecco in it. But some...
View ArticleVariable Matters (Basel, 20-22 September 2019), organized by Barbara Orland...
By Stefanie Gänger Hosted at Basel’s beautiful Pharmacy Museum, the conference “Variable Matters” was designed to bring together historians with an interest in the movement of medicinals and knowledge...
View ArticleA Snake Oil from Tenth Century al-Andalus
Leonie Rau Historians of medicine might know him as Abulcasis, the ‘Father of Surgery,’ but Andalusian physician Abū al-Qāsim Khalaf Ibn al-‘Abbās al-Zahrāwī (936–1013) wrote about much more than the...
View ArticleRevisiting Erik Heinrichs’ The Live Chicken Treatment for Buboes: Trying a...
Today we revisit a post originally published in 2017 by Erik Heinrichs on a seemingly odd treatment for plague buboes: the feathers from a chicken’s backside. Erik notes that there is a very long...
View ArticleMy Charming Ancestor: Lost Spells and Sick Cattle
By Catherine Flood My 6x great grandfather, Timothy Butt, was a charmer. I discovered this recently when I came across a copy of a manuscript he wrote in a box of family papers.[i] Mostly a day book of...
View ArticleFrom the Archives: Springtime in Recipe Books
As spring is on the horizon in the northern hemisphere, this post from our archives presents a wonderful reminder of the ways that seasonality figured into early modern remedies and recipes. This piece...
View ArticleCooking up the Romans: Mrs Beeton’s Antiquity
By Laurence Totelin Paragraph 285 of the 1861 edition of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management is a recipe for baked red mullet with a sauce of anchovies, sherry and cayenne. As is usual in the...
View ArticleFrom the Archives: Cock Ale: “A Homely Aphrodisiac”
From our archives, here is Joel Klein’s wonderful post that details the Cock Ale, an animal-based alcoholic beverage from Early Modern England. This piece originally appeared in a 2014 edition of the...
View ArticleA Spider at the Pulse
By Yijie Huang I received a gift from my supervisor this spring, a vial of “POSITIVITY Pulse Point Oil” from ESPA. As a historian of pulse diagnosis in early modern medicine, I am fascinated by it–not...
View ArticleThe recipe for animal sacrifice in ancient Greece
By Flint Dibble We’re so used to modern, twenty-first century recipes. Everything is spelled out to a tee: ingredients, amounts, instructions. But, even if you look at earlier 20th century recipes, the...
View ArticleChinese American Herbal Medicine: A History of Importation and Improvisation
By Tamara Venit Shelton “Chinese herbalists imported everything from China.” This is what I consistently heard from herbalists I interviewed when writing Herbs and Roots: A History of Chinese Doctors...
View ArticleCanine Cures or Our Best Friend…
By Marc Bruck To paraphrase the old adage: dogs are humanity’s best friend. Loving, loyal and protective, they are often considered members of the family. They are symbols of wealth and power, love and...
View ArticleSnails in medicine – past and present
By Claire Burridge A treatment for teary eyes (Ad lacrimas oculorum): Grind together frankincense, mastic, and snails with their shells. Apply to the forehead in laurel leaves in two parts. It is...
View ArticleRevisiting Laurence Totelin’s Fevers and the Dog Star in Antiquity
Well, the Dog Days of summer are upon us once again…To help us cope with the heat, we revisit Laurence Totelin’s wonderful post from 2018. In “Fevers and the Dog Star in Antiquity”, Laurence tells us...
View ArticleRevisiting Chelsea Clark’s The Wonders of Unicorn Horns: Preventions and...
Editor’s note: Today, we revisit a wonderful post from Chelsea Clark in 2012 on the intersection of magic and medicine from Early Modern England. Drawing on the seventeenth century manuscript ascribed...
View ArticleRevisiting Erik Heinrichs’ The Live Chicken Treatment for Buboes: Trying a...
Today we revisit a post originally published in 2017 by Erik Heinrichs on a seemingly odd treatment for plague buboes: the feathers from a chicken’s backside. Erik notes that there is a very long...
View ArticleVariable Matters (Basel, 20-22 September 2019), organized by Barbara Orland...
By Stefanie Gänger Hosted at Basel’s beautiful Pharmacy Museum, the conference “Variable Matters” was designed to bring together historians with an interest in the movement of medicinals and knowledge...
View ArticleExhibition Review: “Food: Bigger than the Plate”
By Catherine Price The Food: Bigger than the Plate exhibition is taking place at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London from May until October 2019. The exhibition takes you on a journey through the...
View ArticleStockfish and the Texture of Trust in the Early Modern Period
By Jack B. Bouchard “Stockvisch muss man bleüwen – One must beat stockfish” declared Balthasar Staindl in the first line of a lengthy entry on cooking cod in his 1544 Kochbuch.[1] Wielding a blunt...
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