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Tales from the Archives: To Make a Fine Apple Pye

It’s cold, wet and rather miserable in the UK at the moment. Fortunately, the Christmas lights bring some good cheer, as does lovely late-autumn food. My favourite autumnal dish is the apple-crumble,...

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Revisiting Lisa Smith’s Coffee: A Remedy Against the Plague

Editor’s note: Today, we revisit a post by our editor Lisa Smith on the use of coffee as an eighteenth century cure-all against smallpox and the plague. The botanist Richard Bradley claimed that coffee...

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Revisiting Tillmann Taape’s Recipes against the plague – in pharmaceutical code?

Editor’s note: Today we revisit a post originally published in 2013 by Tillmann Taape on plague remedies given by the apothecary Hieronymus Brunschwig in his Liber pestilentialis (1500). The book...

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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...

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Revisiting 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...

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A 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...

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Eggs 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...

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Interview 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...

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Remembering 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...

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Imperfect 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...

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Of 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...

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Treating 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...

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Cooking 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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