Revisiting 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 ArticleRevisiting Diana Luft’s Treating the Stone in Sixteenth-Century Wales
Today we revisit a post originally published in 2017 by Diana Luft on a sixteenth-century recipe against the stone ascribed to a certain Vicar of Gwenddwr, Wales. The recipe is in Welsh, but includes...
View ArticleA valuable ancient commodity: Miltos of Kea
By Effie Photos-Jones The island of Kea in the North Cyclades is by some travel agents’ reckoning the (rich) Athenians’ ‘best-kept secret’, their beautifully-designed stone-built villas merging...
View ArticleEggs and Invisible Ink: George and Giovanni
By Sean Coughlin In a 2015 episode of Turn, a US Revolutionary War TV drama on AMC, George Washington’s spy Abraham Woodhull uses a special ink made with alum to write secret messages under the shells...
View ArticleInterview with the Editors: The Cultural History of Medicine
By Elaine Leong, Lisa Smith and Laurence Totelin The Cultural History of Medicine, a six-volume collection under the direction of Roger Cooter, was published in April 2021 by Bloomsbury. The editors of...
View ArticleRemembering Terry Turner (1929-2019): Pharmaceutical History Collector...
By Laurence Totelin, with input from Briony Hudson A few years ago, my colleagues Heather Trickey (social sciences), Julia Sanders (midwifery) and I decided to put together a small exhibition on the...
View ArticleImperfect practice: a case for making early modern recipes badly
By Kate Owen I used to think “what’s the point of recipe making if you know you will not be making them with the diligence and expertise needed for practice based research?” Recreating early modern...
View ArticleOf Wine and Chocolate in Anne Dormer’s Letters
By Daphna Oren-Magidor “I drink chocolate when my soul is sad to death.” This statement echoes through time – who among us has not used chocolate as a temporary cure for the blues? – but it was...
View ArticleTreating winter ailments – recreating three recipes from al-Andalus in the...
Katarzyna Gromek Winter in medieval al-Andalus varied from the rainy, foggy, and cool season in Córdoba to snowy freezing weather in regions at higher elevations. The winter dampness seemingly...
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...
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