Years in the archives

When the Library surveys readers to assess their level of satisfaction with our service, a common comment is to highlight the helpfulness of the staff (a comment for which we are extremely grateful). We’d like to think that this begins with recruiting the right people; but it’s also a result of a stable staff, long-serving Library employees building their experience and skills as time passes, and sharing this knowledge with readers and colleagues. On that note, today we’d like to mark twenty years’ service to the Library by Dr Richard Aspin, the Head of Research and Scholarship.

Richard joined us from Lambeth Palace Library in 1991, arriving in a library very different from today’s. His role initially was as Curator of Western Manuscripts, head of a department of just two people looking after pre-1900 archival material: twentieth-century material was looked after by the then Contemporary Medical Archives Centre. Since that time we have seen the merger of those two bodies into today’s Archives and Manuscripts department; the introduction of a database to make archive catalogues visible and searchable online; the refitting of 183 Euston Road not once but twice; and now, the impending transformation of our reader experience by mass digitisation and the collection of born-digital archives. Throughout these changes, one constant has been Richard’s combination of level-headedness, diplomacy and scholarship worn lightly. We, and our readers, have been the beneficiaries.

Author: Chris Hilton

Arguing on the telephone

On this day in 1876, one hundred and thirty five years ago, Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone that he had spent the previous two years developing.

Obviously since that day the telephone has been used as widely by medical men and women as by the rest of the population. The number of lives saved simply by our being able to dial 999 (or 911, or whatever other number applies in our country) and summon urgent medical assistance, defies any attempt to calculate it. Less well known, however, is the medical element in the story of the telephone’s development. Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh in 1847, the son of Alexander Melville Bell (1819-1905). Bell senior was a speech therapist and elocutionist, and his own father, Alexander Bell (1790-1865), grandfather of the inventor, was also an elocutionist.

Alexander Graham Bell moved into the family specialism: after education at the Royal High School in Edinburgh he spent some time in 1862 learning from his grandfather in London before teaching both music and elocution as a pupil-teacher in Elgin. He studied at Edinburgh University for a year before returning to Elgin as a master in 1865; however, in 1867 he moved to London, joining his father who had taken on the work of the senior Alexander Bell. Here he studied anatomy and physiology at the University of London, and became skilled at teaching the deaf. In 1870 Bell and his parents emigrated to North America; here Alexander Graham Bell continued his work with the deaf, becoming Professor of Vocal Physiology and Elocution at Boston University in 1873.

From work with the deaf, then, grew Bell's interest in phonetics and work on the transmission of sound by electricity, which led to the development of the telephone. Bell built, for example, on work by Koenig and Scott on the translation of sound into visual images via electric impulses: this clearly is a concept of great potential for communication by deaf people. However, once one has worked out how to translate sound into electrical impulses, there is a wide variety of things that can be done with them, and one obvious use is to transmit them over distance and then reverse the process, turning them back into sound: the modern telephone. Bell spent much of the winter of 1874/5 in experiments and in summer 1875 demonstrated a system that used a diaphragm to translate sound into electrical impulses, transmit it down a wire using various interrupted tones of different frequencies, and translate it back into intelligible human speech at the other end using another vibrating membrane. In spring 1876, he patented the system, having already set up a company to exploit it: commercially, the rest is history. As early as 1878, Bell was demonstrating his invention to Queen Victoria, MS.8748 in the Wellcome Library comprising a letter written by Bell about this occasion. His telephone system exploded across the world and, arguably, dominated global communications for the next hundred years.

In the English-speaking world, this is often seen as the whole story. However, in Italy in particular another much less well-known figure, Antonio Meucci, also gets a part in the story. Meucci was born in Florence in 1808; he studied chemical and mechanical engineering at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts and later worked at the Teatro della Pergola in Florence as a stage technician. In 1834 he devised a form of acoustic telephone to communicate between the stage and control room at the Teatro, modelled on ships' speaking pipes. However, his involvement in the turbulent politics of a divided Italy led him to imprisonment and exile: he and his wife left Italy in 1835.

He went first to Cuba, where his work on Mesmer's theories of natural electricity led him to invent electrotherapy equipment; he is also said to have devised a form of telephone through which inarticulate speech could be detected. His friendship with Garibaldi made him suspect in Cuba and the success of Samuel Morse in inventing the telegraph suggested new opportunities, so in 1850 he relocated to the United States. He set up a tallow candle factory in Staten Island, New York, and used this to finance work on an electromagnetic telephone, constructing various prototypes; however, his finances grew worse and worse and although he filed a patent caveat for one such machine, dubbed the "telettrofono", in 1871, he was unable to convert it to a full patent and unable to renew it in 1874.

When Alexander Graham Bell patented his telephone in 1876, Meucci sued him for infringement of intellectual copyright; a series of lawsuits went all the way to the Supreme Court, and dragged on for the remainder of Meucci's life and beyond: Meucci died in 1889 with these issues unresolved but having failed to profit from his inventions. The surviving cases were finally dropped, without decision, in 1897.

There is considerable debate and partisanship on both sides; the issues causing debate can be summarised as whether Meucci's own patent documents mention a mechanism for converting sound waves into electromagnetic ones and back again, the intelligibility of the sounds transmitted by Meucci's device, whether or not Meucci described his invention in the New York Italian newspaper L'Eco d'Italia in 1861, all issues of the paper from that period having perished, and the precise dating of some of Meucci's papers (at one of the court hearings he was accused of having fabricated papers retrospectively).

Like an unsatisfactory telephone, the debate has generated noise but little clarity, with the protagonists tending to hear what they want to hear. The Wellcome Library holds as its MS.7323 a dossier of letters by Meucci which were displayed at the 1929 Florence Scientific Exhibition. Fascist Italy of course took it as an item of faith that Meucci had beaten Bell to the punch, but their viewpoint is scarcely unbiassed. As with many other inventions, it seems clear that scientific developments were converging on the telephone and if one person had not invented it someone else would have done so shortly afterwards. Bell, whatever the rights and wrongs of his claim to primacy, certainly had the capital to patent and develop the application; the older man did not. Bell died at his home in Nova Scotia in 1922 on 2nd August; he was buried at 6:25pm on August 4th, at which time all telephone traffic in the United States was stopped for one minute as a tribute. In contrast, in the English-speaking world Meucci is only a sad footnote. Next time you lift the receiver, spare him a thought.

The image of the doctor on the telephone at the head of this post comes from Wellcome Images, image number V0011546, by D.L. Ghilchip (1932).

A remarkable man

We recently received, from his granddaughter's executor, a couple of manuscripts of Colonel Frederick Smith (1858-1933) of the Royal Army Medical Corps. When cataloguing these, and turning to the usual sources of reference for information on his career, I discovered that Col. Smith had had a most remarkable career. He had enlisted in the ranks of the Medical Service Corps at a time when it was not expected that this would lead eventually to an officer's commission. After serving all over the Empire, Smith was posted to Dublin, where he was able to pursue medical studies, alongside his arduous official duties, as well as managing to spend time with his growing family. On his receiving the Licentiates of the Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons of Ireland, the War Office was petitioned to grant him a commission.

As a Surgeon on probation he was sent to the Army Medical School at Netley, where he not only passed the relevant courses, but achieved the Herbert Prize for the best man of the year. In 1890, aged 32, having already served over a dozen years in the ranks, he was commissioned Surgeon-Captain.

He was then posted to the Far East for several years, spent some time working with Sir Almroth Wright in the Bacteriological Laboratory at Netley, and in 1898 was sent to Sierra Leone in West Africa. This was already known, because of its climate and local diseases, as 'the white man's grave', and was about to erupt into what was known as the Sierra Leone Rising or Hut Tax Rebellion against the imposition of exorbitant taxes on dwellings and demands for labour on public works by the authorities of the newly established British Protectorate.

Smith's experiences in Sierra Leone formed the basis for the fictional work of which we now hold a draft (MS.8701/1) plus an edited clean typescript version prepared by his granddaughter, Jean Overton Fuller MS.8701/2), "Yemma: a Story of ‘The White Man’s Grave’ in ’98" (alternative title "Jungle Savage"). Although he published very extensively on medical research, questions of hygiene, and administrative questions to do with military medicine, Fuller suggested in the foreword to her edited version that 'he had not the technique of writing fiction', and this, as well as its '"advanced" and shocking' nature was the reason why the narrative was never published.

His career took him to South Africa during the years of conflict there. Much of his work involved sanitation - he returned to West Africa as Sanitary Officer to the forces there and served as Divisional Sanitary Officer on the North West Frontier of India.

His distinctions for involvement in military campaigns included the Mendiland expedition medal and clasp for his service in Sierra Leone; mention in dispatches, Queen's medal with four clasps, and the D.S.O. for the Boer War; medal with clasp for service in the Mohmand campaign on the North-West Frontier of India of 1908; and in the war of 1914-18, he was four times mentioned in dispatches, received the C.M.G. in 1917 and the C.B. in 1918. Awards for his work in research, which covered a very wide range of subjects, included the Parkes memorial medal and prize twice, in 1897 and in 1907; the Alexander memorial gold medal twice, in 1903 and1906; and the Enno-Sandes gold medal of the United States in 1903.

Recalled to duty in 1914 on the outbreak of the First World War, Smith was appointed to the command of No. 4 General Hospital in France. The adventures and misadventures in setting up and administering what was intended to be a 'Stationary' Hospital are recounted in "Bloodless Adventures of Colonel Xerxes Wilson, RAMC at the Back of the Front in the Opening Months of the Great War" (MS.8701/3), which is indicated to be a pseudonymous account of Smith's actual experiences.

MS.8701 is not the only material we have illustrating the life, career and opinions of this remarkable man: the RAMC Muniment Collection includes his scrapbook (RAMC/404), a file of miscellaneous papers relating to his activities (RAMC/501), and a copy of his respected work on Modern bullet wounds and modern treatment, with special regard to long bones and joints, field appliances and first aid (1903) (RAMC/713). An obituary may be found in the British Medical Journal for 1933, and an affectionate biographical memoir by Jean Overton Fuller is appended to her edited version of "Yemma". There is also an entry in Peterkin, Johnston and Drew, Commissioned officers in the medical services of the British Army, 1660-1960 Vol 1, no. 7291.

'A Vampyre in Hungary'

"We have received certain Advice of a Sort of a Prodigy lately discovered in Hungary...namely of Dead Bodies Sucking, as it were, the blood of the living" (Whitehall Evening Post, 9 March 1731-2)

This quote comes the Wellcome Library manuscript shown above (MS.2801). Noted down by its anonymous compiler are contemporary accounts from the 18th century, of “strange events, accidents and phenomena”. Many of these incidents are little remembered today, but the first case in the volume is particularly apt to relate on Halloween.

Titled ‘A Vampyre in Hungary’, it records an account from the Whitehall Evening Post which has since come to be regarded as one of the best documented accounts of vampirism.

The account is based on the report of Austrian officials, who were sent to investigate incidents in the village of Medvegia in rural Serbia (then under Austrian control) in the winter of 1731. The locals there reported that the incidents dated back to 1726 when a local man by the name of Arnold Paole - anglicised by the Whitehall Evening Post to Arnold Paul - died after falling from a hay wagon.

Before his death, Paole had revealed that during his lifetime he had been troubled by a vampire, when living near Gossowa in Turkish Serbia. To cure himself of this affliction, Paole had eaten earth from the vampire’s grave and smeared himself with the vampire's blood.

In the thirty days or so after Paole’s death, villagers reported they were being bothered by the deceased Paole and that four people had been killed by him. As a result, Paole’s body was dug up forty days after his burial. The corpse was seen to be undecayed and believing this to be evidence of Paole’s vampiric state, a stake was driven through his heart and his body burned. Believing too that the four people allegedly killed by Paole would also become vampires, these villagers were also disinterred and their bodies treated in the same way as Paole’s.

In late 1731, more deaths occurred in Medvegia, with more than 10 people dying within several weeks of each other. The locals believed this to be a recurrence of the vampirism outbreak of five years previously, explaining that the first villager to die had eaten the meat of sheep that the "previous vampires" (i.e. Paole and his victims) had killed. It was to investigate this outbreak that authorities came to the area. They investigated the deaths (learning of the case of Paole in the process), reported their findings and then the process of dissemination begun, leading eventually to our anonymous writer noting the event down in his commonplace book, from the report in the Whitehall Evening Post.

As the report notes, the officials visiting Medvegia in 1731 believed the bodies they saw – most of which had not decomposed – were in “the vampiric condition” and the bodies were treated in a similar fashion to Paole and his victims in 1726.

Viewed today, the phenomena attributed to the described in these accounts of the disinterred fit with our modern understandings of decomposition. However, many of the motifs of vampirism – victims of the vampire becoming vampires themselves; bodies not being decayed after death; stakes through hearts – are present here in the case of Arnold Paole.

(More contextualising detail on Paole can be found in a range of related books in the Wellcome Library).

Say cheese!

One of those quotations that comes up again and again is General de Gaulle’s complaint about the impossibility of uniting France: “How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?” For the serious gourmet, of course, the riposte is, “How could you not want to govern a nation with that much cheese?” France’s cheeses are justly celebrated. Less well-known is Britain’s wealth of cheeses: sweet or strong, creamy or crumbly, pale or orange red, with or without the blue that comes from mould and yes, made from various milks (contrary to common belief, one does not have to cross the Channel to meet cheese made from sheep or goat’s milk). The heritage is a long one: Cheshire, Britain’s oldest cheese, dates from at least the eleventh century and is mentioned in the Doomsday Book - it was old enough and famous enough for London to have pubs named the Cheshire Cheese before Camembert was even thought of. This is British Cheese Week, a week of events to celebrate this wealth (for more information, visit the appropriately named British Cheese Board or simply Google to find recipe sites such as this one). With apologies to any lactose-intolerant readers, today’s posting exploring the Wellcome Library holdings takes as guiding principle the words of the nation’s favourite eccentric plasticine inventor: “Cheese, Gromit! That’s it! We’ll go somewhere where there’s cheese!”

First, make your cheese. As has been mentioned before, the Wellcome Library’s manuscript books of recipes often contain not merely medical advice, but information on anything that might help to run a household. One such mixed bag is the book compiled in the late seventeenth century by the Boyle family (one of the writers is apparently Katherine Boyle, afterwards Lady Ranelagh (1614-1691), who was the sister of the physicist Robert Boyle). (MS.1340, complete digitised facsimile here.) Most of the recipes are medical but we also find many culinary ones, including several for cheese. We will pass over the recipe for “slipcoat cheese” as a little complicated for beginners and instead give the one for “a winter cheese”, to give our readers something consoling to read as the British weather begins to bite:

Take the Mornings Milk Strained, and the Cream of the morning and night before strained into it, if it be too cold warm some of the Milk: Put a little quick Rennet into it the less the milder it will be, Cover it and let it come [= curdle] leisurely[;] when it is come turn it gently with a thin disk, pressing it down with warm hands, Whey it [= drain off the whey] and heave it into a Cheese vate [= vat], laying a plank on it press it by degrees, Cloth it and turn it as you See cause, about 4 hours after when it is well wrung turn it out of the vate into a clean tubb and with a long knife Slash it in thin pieces and wipe them dry with a cloth and put them in fair water in another tubb, then dry them in a cloth and put them in the former tubb, Mash it all to crumbles, and having saved 3 pints or less of the Nights Cream not put into the Cheese before pour that Cream into the Crumbled Cheese now, Mix it very well and then heave it gently into the Cheese-vate; having a wett Cloth in it, Lay the plank very warily and weight very little at first, turn it that Night in Moist Cloths and next day you may put on more weight but with care Salt it. Some like Butter in stead of Cream in the Mashing. It may be made from the beginning of May till the latter end of August. (The recipe is split between two pages, beginning on MS.1340/67 and continuing on MS.1340/68.)

Just the thing to bring out in the dark days of winter, though the recipe has its frustrating aspects. These are recipes written as an aide memoire, or a note to future generations of the family: they are not a complete step-by-step guide for a stranger to follow, and so assume a great deal that is not made explicit, dodge back to expand on things mentioned before, and generally have a more conversational tone than today’s instruction manuals. How much swearing there would be from anyone who tried to follow this recipe from scratch without reading it through first: that casual mention two-thirds of the way through of “having saved 3 pints or less of the Nights Cream not put into the Cheese before” would derail almost everyone.

Having made your cheese, some would say that this is all you need – well, that plus some crackers or wine to accompany it. The many recipes that you can make using cheese, however, also occur in our holdings. A quick search of the archive catalogue reveals several recipes for cheesecake. A modern recipe for this tends to involve one buying commercially-produced curd cheese but of course these recipes date from a time when that basic ingredient was also something that you would have to make yourself, so the process begins right back at the milk stage. This version of the recipe comes from a book compiled by the Gibson family (MS.311, complete digitised facsimile here) in the seventeenth century:

Take 5 quarts of new milk and one of creame, sett it to sam [ = curdle], then whey it [ = drain off the whey] and rub it well that there be no lumps in it, then take almost half a pound of butter melted[,] ten yolks of eggs, mix these all together with a little rose water, then sweeten it to your tast[e], and to fill them, you may put in currents or what spices you please. (MS.311/53)

As mentioned above, these recipes take a lot for granted: only by looking at the next recipe in the book, also for cheesecake, would you know that the final stage is to put this mixture in a dish lined with pastry and then to bake the cake! The seventeeth-century oven, of course, was not predictable: the heat came from a fire and individual ovens would differ radically, even from day to day. We must not, therefore, look to recipes from this period for precise instructions on oven temperature and cooking time – and readers trying these at home should be prepared for many instances of trial and error…

Turning from sweet to savoury, MS.1325 (complete digitised facsimile here), a largely anonymous compilation again from the late seventeenth century, includes a recipe for “an Amlett of Cheese”:

Take Eight Eggs & break – grate a Nutmeg in a little Salt. Beat them well. Take a pound of Parmasan Cheese & grated put to the Eggs. Then take a [penie = penny?] of Butter & put into a ffrying pan & Melt it Then take half the butter & put it to the Eggs & Stirr them well about. Then put in the Eggs into the ffrying pan and ffry it on One Side[;] w[i]th a hott frie Shovell warme your Amlett on th’other Side. Then ffould it up ffoure Square and put it on a Plate. Squeese an Orring over it and Garnish with Orring. (MS.1325/87)

Cheese, of course, is not to everyone’s taste. We would be unfair if we did not mention this, sad though the present writer finds that concept. A piece of medical ephemera in the collection sums up this dichotomy. The early nineteenth-century humorous broadside “The Physician’s Receipt” describes a how a patient with fever may be treated with soup made from leeks and toasted cheese. If the patient is Welsh, this will cure him – Welshmen, in jokes from at least the sixteenth century onwards, being depicted as loving cheese almost as much as they do leeks. If he is English, it will kill him. Well, de gustibus non est disputandem [there’s no accounting for tastes]: you don’t have to be Welsh to love cheese (although British Cheese Week does include quite a few events in Wales) and you don’t have to come from east of Offa’s Dyke to dislike it. For those of us who find it irresistable, the Wellcome Library’s holdings provide plenty of ways to think about it and while away the time until one gets home and can raid the cheese-board.

Wallace and Gromit footnote fact: according to this interview, the word “Cheese” even shaped Wallace’s face: the way that his mouth projects beyond his cheeks was suggested by the way that actor Peter Sallis said “cheeeese” when he voiced the character.

Images, from top:
1/ Cheese and crackers: from Wellcome Images (image N0028321)
2/ Presses, including a cheese press top left: from the Library's Iconographic Collections and also visible on Wellcome Images as image V0023780.
3/ Another recipe for cheesecake, this time from the eighteenth century: MS.7747 by Mrs Frances Ranson. Also visible on Wellcome Images (image L0031621).
4/ The Physician's Receipt: reproduced from Wellcome Images (image L0003617)

Fire, Riot and Compound Fracture

"Hannah Stewart, 21 years of age of a good habit of body, a married Woman was brought into the Hosp[ita]l on Wednesday night the 7th Inst. with a compound Fracture of the Wrist Joint wherein both Radius and Ulna were fractured, and the soft parts received considerable Injury…"

On June 7th 1780 – almost exactly 230 years ago - a young woman is brought, no doubt frightened and in severe pain, to St Bartholomew's Hospital with a serious injury to her wrist, and other soft tissue wounds. She is seen by Percival Pott, the Surgeon of St Bartholomew's: a man of considerable eminence in his field, and as luck would have it someone who is chiefly remembered now for his work on compound fractures. A medical man named Watt writes notes on the case in a tall, narrow volume now held at the Wellcome Library as MS.4337. For the moment, the survival of her arm is in the balance. Her pain and distress, however, form part of a wider historical picture: she comes to the hospital on that summer night as a result of a train of events that began a few days earlier, exactly 230 years ago on June 2nd 1780.

London in 1780 was a city in ferment. The explosive growth in Britain's trade and industry during the preceding century had led to an expansion of the city's population and even further strain placed upon the creaking assemblage of local bodies, many of them private or voluntary, responsible for the city's infrastructure. Perhaps most significantly, there was no centrally organised professional police force. The London mob was notoriously volatile and, in these days before the vote was extended to any but the better-off, riot and civil disorder were almost the only means whereby the populace could make its views felt to power.

To this explosive mix was added the strain of war. By 1780 the American colonies had been in revolt for some years and there was considerable political division, not merely over the competance of the government's war effort but also over whether the war should be fought at all: many sympathised openly with the rebels, whose maxim that if one was taxed by a government one should have the right to elect it struck a chord with many radicals on this side of the Atlantic. The colonists' allegations of despotic behaviour by George III and his ministers mirrored similar allegations made by British critics of the status quo.

Into this volatile situation arrived the issue of Catholic emancipation, in the shape of the 1778 Papists Act that reduced some of the restrictions placed upon Roman Catholics by law. To the twenty-first century reader, it seems axiomatic that greater religious tolerance is a progressive cause. In the eighteenth century, however, this was not necessarily accepted. Catholicism for many had been associated with attempts by foreign despots to subdue English or British independence: the liberties of the British subject and of Parliament, as established most notably after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, had been prised out of the grip of Stuart monarchs who were Catholic in their sympathies and often allied with Catholic absolutist régimes abroad, such as the France of Louis XIV. There was widespread fear – whether or not this was justified – that extending liberty to Roman Catholics was the thin end of a wedge that would end up with absolutism and the denial of liberties to all. Particularly pointed was the issue of the army. The inheritors of the Glorious Revolution settlement had a strong mistrust of a large standing army, as a tool that could potentially be used by a despotic monarch. One driver of the 1778 Act was the need for more soldiers to wage war in America: in order to achieve this, it would be made easier for Catholics to join the army by absolving them of the requirement to take an oath to defend the established religion. To some this measure looked profoundly dangerous: not merely letting loose a force that tended to despotism, but arming it. To understand the events of 1780, we have to put away our modern ideas about religious tolerance and try to see this situation as its contemporaries did; only then can we make sense of the forces that converged to bring Hannah Stewart to St Bartholomew’s on that June night.

In 1780 Lord George Gordon, a gifted and eccentric propagandist, became President of the Protestant Association, whose aim was to force the repeal of these new measures. Playing on the fears of despotic monarchy and a Catholic army outlined above, he managed to prevent the legislation being extended to Scotland, but had no success in gaining its repeal in England and Wales through peaceful channels. In late spring 1780, he took his campaign to the streets. Now the pace of events quickens, hurrying Hannah Stewart towards her injury and meeting with the surgeon Percival Pott.

On June 2nd, 230 years ago today, the Protestant Association led a march to Parliament to deliver a petition for the repeal of the 1778 Act. The march on June 2nd was huge, estimated at around 50,000 people and swelling as it passed through the city waving banners proclaiming "No Popery". On arrival at Westminster the crowd attempted to force their way into the House of Commons: Lord George Gordon was allowed in to hand the petition over but his followers remained outside, milling around in a state of agitation without a clear object. It was almost inevitable that this situation turned ugly. Members of the House of Lords, arriving for a sitting, were attacked and their carriages destroyed. Although troops eventually dispersed the mob around Parliament without violence, it was the beginning of several days of sporadic, increasing disorder. Later that night there were attacks on the embassies of Catholic powers and areas known to house rich Catholics. The following night the poor area of Moorfields, home to many Irish Catholic immigrants, was ransacked and many houses burned. Dickens in his novel Barnaby Rudge gives vivid descriptions of days of mounting disorder, of how the Lord Chief Justice's house was attacked, how Newgate Prison was broken open and largely burned down, how streets filled with looters were lit by burning houses as the gutters ran with blazing alcohol. The situation deteriorated until 7th June, when the Army was called out to disperse any assemblies of more than four people, with orders to start shooting if they refused.

Here we return to Hannah Stewart. It is the night of 7th June when she is brought to St Bartholomew's, and the passage immediately after the one quoted at the head of this article identifies the cause of her injury:

Both Radius and Ulna were fractured, and the soft parts received considerable Injury from a musket ball shot by one of the soldiers who was on duty quelling the disturbances that arose…

Whether a rioter or a bystander, Hannah Stewart is one of the walking wounded who were the casualties of that night. In a sense, she is lucky – almost three hundred were shot dead in the suppression of the rioting. Although she cannot have thought herself fortunate, she is also in luck in the man who sees her. Percival Pott was a senior man at the hospital, at the height of his career, and an important figure in the slow rise of surgery to medical respectability. Before the advent of anaesthesia and antisepsis in the second half of the nineteenth century, surgeons were the poor relations of the medical world: their profession depended heavily on speed and strength as much as skill and knowledge, and deaths of their patients were common. The rise of surgery to its current exalted position, rather than its being perceived as next door to butchery, was a slow process. Pott was instrumental in some of the steps along the way. He was born in London in 1714, in Threadneedle Street – the rioters who attacked the Bank of England in 1780 were probably attacking a building put up over his birthplace. Like most surgeons of the time he learned on the job, by apprenticeship to the then Assistant Surgeon at St Bartholomew's, Edward Nourse. He became Assistant Surgeon himself in 1745, the year in which the Surgeons at last formed their own professional organisation: previously they were governed by the one of the City of London's craft guilds, the Barber-Surgeons' Company, a combination that reflected the way one man might in the medieval and early modern period combine surgery and bone-setting, hair-cutting, tooth-drawing and various other skills. In this year, however, a separate Company of Surgeons was formed, marking a step in the march to medical respectability. (Twenty years after the Gordon Riots, the Royal College of Surgeons of England was founded and replaced the Company.)

Pott himself was instrumental in another such step when, in 1756, he was thrown from his horse and suffered a compound fracture of the leg. At the time, amputation was often seen as the only remedy; however, Pott and Nourse, his old master, concluded that the leg could be saved. Convalescing afterwards and unable to work, Pott discovered a talent for writing about medicine; he used the time at home to write a treatise on hernias that was the start of a string of monographs issued over the next decades. Among them, in 1768, was a work on Fractures and Dislocations which drew on his own experience when describing compound fracture of the long leg bones. The combined fracture and dislocation of the ankle that he analysed in this treatise is now known as a Pott’s Fracture after his description. As well as writing copiously, Pott had a large and eminent private practice, being consulted by (among others) the writer Samuel Johnson, the painter Thomas Gainsborough and the actor David Garrick. Hannah Stewart is being seen by London's top surgeon, and a man who had made a particular study of her type of injury.

The seriousness of that injury can be judged by the fact that Pott, according to the casebook, gave little hope for her hand: "From the appearance of the Fracture at the Time, … it was thought advisable to amputate". Hannah Stewart, however, refuses: "the woman not giving her consent, the wound was put up in a common Poultice." "Opiates were given to appease the pain" but she must have remained in severe discomfort. The case history, written up a few days later, notes "her arm today looks less inflamed - but rather painful – her hand is swell'd and also painful. Mr Pott saw it and ordered her to go on with the Poultice. Some small fragments of loose stones were taken out on her admission."

At the foot of the page, Watt scrawls "Discharged well." The absence of inflammation means, perhaps, that she has escaped serious infection, which would be a key factor in keeping the limb; Pott identified the presence or not of inflammation as a key to prognosis in fractures when describing his own case. Whether infection developed later and she lost the hand after all, where she went on leaving the hospital, and where her bones lie – shattered or otherwise – is unknown. But in this one page from the hospital casebook we see a vivid window opening into the past, showing us how various historical forces converge on that summer night in 1780 and how, at the point that they meet, a young woman lies afraid and in pain, not knowing whether the next day will bring her an appointment with the surgeon's knife.

After the rioting was put down by troops, Gordon was tried for treason, but found not guilty. However, he died some years later in the rebuilt Newgate prison, confined there after further political activity. In a final interesting twist, he was buried not far from the Wellcome Library. Just north of the Euston Road lies the former churchyard of St James's, a church that was originally a chapel in a burial ground serving the parish of St James Piccadilly, set up when central London began to run out of space for burials. In the nineteenth century the space was converted to a park and the gravestones stacked around the edges. A Victorian plaque at the Hampstead Road entrance, now sadly dilapidated, proudly records its conversion to public open space, but makes no mention of the eccentric agitator whose grave lies somewhere below the pleasure garden and children's playground.

Illustrations show, in order: Wellcome MS.4337 (close-up and full page); the burning of Newgate Prison; an early 19th century collection of images of St Bartholomew's Hospital; Percival Pott; and the entrance to St James's Gardens today.

The crust of it!

This week is National Pie Week in Great Britain, celebrating the long history of pies and pasties in British cookery. Although the haggis and the Roast Beef of Old England occur more in song and story, food wrapped in pastry is a running motif in the story of British cookery, eaten by kings and labourers alike. The Wellcome Library’s holdings relating to food are extensive – we have already mentioned, for instance, our large number of manuscript recipe books, of which the seventeenth-century items are now online. Browsing through these, the reader comes across all manner of pies: penny-plain or decorative and fancy, basic and nutritious or figurative and metaphorical, palatable or disgusting. Here we highlight some pastry-wrapped delicacies from our collections.

All manner of recipes for savoury pies occur in the manuscript collection. For the modern reader, used to the dominance of a few types of meat as pie fillings, their variety comes as a surprise: in particular, seafoods are a common filling, with oysters, lobster and shrimps (the last-named being measured in quarts rather than by weight: a heroic quantity) all being used. We, however, will highlight another recipe, one that sheds incidental light on a common turn of phrase. We speak still of someone “eating humble pie” when we mean that they have been humiliated: the expression comes ultimately from a French word for the entrails of a deer, Humble Pie (or Umble Pie, as it was originally) being made from these less choice cuts after the more sought-after parts of the animal had been taken. In our MS.3769, compiled by a Mrs Jane Parker around 1651, we find a pie slightly further down the social scale than this, even: an ersatz Humble Pie to be made from lamb’s meat.

To bake a lams head and portinance [viscera] in a pie to eat like the Umbles of a dear

Take a lambs head and portenance and parboyle it a litell and then Chop it small as you doe for minst [mince] pies with a po[u]nd of beefe suet, a pou[n]d corrance [currants] [and] a few sweet herbs[;] season it with peper and salt and so bake it[.] When it comes out of the oven you may put a litell sack [sherry] with a litell sugar and a litell boter [butter] and warme it and put it into the pie.

How to make the pastry case, in this recipe, is seen as too obvious to bother mentioning. Noticeable also in seventeenth century recipes is the absence of timings or oven temperatures – these are refinements that only come in when items are cooked in predictable gas or electric ovens. Working on an old-fashioned kitchen range, whose temperature would differ from house to house and from day to day, the cook would simply put the item in and let it bake until it was done, testing frequently and adjusting in the way we still do now with items cooked on the top of the stove.

The British pudding, in which beef suet can be used in a sweet dish, often startles people from other countries. It is interesting to see the same combination of suet and fruit in this savoury dish, suggesting that we are misguided in drawing a sharp line between sweet and savoury dishes when looking at these traditional recipes. The recipe book of Hannah Bisaker (née Buchanan), dating from 1692, endorses this view, with the many pies listed in its opening pages including, next to each other, “Veale Pye Savery” and “Veale Pye Sweete”. As we noted in an earlier blog posting, however, Bisaker’s recipe book is of particular interest for the attention it pays to the outside of pies as well as their content. For Jane Parker, the pastry case was something not even worth mentioning in the recipe. Hannah Bisaker, in contrast, gives up several whole pages to templates for elaborate pastry shapes. Whatever the content of her pies – and as well as the two veal recipes mentioned above, she cites hare, venison, mincemeat (using real meat) steak and “stump pie”, a sweet recipe combining meat, sugar and dried fruit, just in the first few pages – they would be housed with appropriate care and ceremony.

From pies literal to pies figurative, and a much less palatable recipe. On the shelves of the Library's Reading Room, Howard W. Haggard's 1929 history of medicine Devils, Drugs and Doctors reproduces a caricature by Robert Cruickshank (brother of the more famous George) in which a corpulent doctor tucks into "Cholera Pie". The image reflects the belief that an epidemic that was disastrous for the public was good financial news for the doctor: his pie here rests on a table labelled "Board of Wealth", a pun on "Board of Health". For the ultimate in unsavoury pies, however, we must go to Fleet Street and the story of Sweeney Todd, the famous barber whose customers reputedly ended up in the products of his neighbour's pie shop. Sweeney Todd: the real story of the demon barber of Fleet Street sits on the Library's shelves at shelfmark KM.43 (and in passing, how many of our readers know that this shelfmark takes them to a long rank of works on famous British murderers?). Mercifully, it contains no recipes.

The image at the head of this posting is an engraving after Hogarth, whose details can be seen here.

All recipes cited here are tried strictly at the cook's own risk; and pies containing human flesh, of course, should not be made at all.

Quick fixes, saints and symbolism: a rare surviving devotional recipe manuscript from the early 15th century. Item of the Month - February 2010

Oak panels of manuscript showing stitching binding

It is rare to find a manuscript from the early 15th century that combines folk remedies with religious iconography and a royal heritage to boot - even more rare is to find one that has been heavily defaced.

Such a manuscript exists in the Archives and Manuscripts collection at the Wellcome Library - MS.5262. Lara Artemis, former conservator here at the library, uncovered the manuscript as part of her MA in Medieval History. In the process, she unpeeled the layers of what turned out to be a fascinating and possibly unique insight, not only into medieval medicine, but of religious symbolism at a time of particular spiritual turmoil - the reformation.

Inscription of Andrewe Wylkynson

Although the dating remains speculative, it is believed to be from around the early 15th century partly because of the dedications within. There is proof of its 16th century ownership in the form of 'Andrewe Wylkynson Surgeon'.

More intriguing is the fact that it belonged to Henry Dyngley of Worcestershire who died in 1589 and came from a line of staunch catholics and rural famers working as doctors. Dyngley married Mary Neville, the daughter of Knight Sir Edward Neville who not only held a long list of prestigious roles within the court of Henry VIII, but who descended from Edward II and Queen Isabel of England in the 13th century. Isabel was a keen patron of medicine and was famously paranoid about her health. It is no suprise then to find the health regimen, a sweet wine tonic, is dedicated to her at the end of the manuscript.

Equally fascinating is the manuscript's association with oak. Not only is it bound in oak but the religious images feature oak trees and acorns in all but one. Traditionally a pagan symbol, the oak was re-interpreted by Christians to represent Christ, a symbol of endurance and strength in the face of adversity. Given the possible date of the manuscript, and the significant damage to the religious images only, suggests this manuscript is a rare survivor of Henry VIII's iconoclastic reformation when vast quantities of religious materials were destroyed in a protestant bid to rid the country of any visible signs of catholicism.

Why did the iconoclast stop at the religious images only? The explanation seems to be clear: this was too useful a manuscript full of day to day 'quick health fixes' that would have been invaluable to a well-to-do family like the Dyngley's. This was an era where university educated medical practitioners were in short supply, particularly in rural areas and folk remedies proved invaluable.

The practical recipes include how to reduce the swelling of the scrotum: "Who so hap ache or swellynge In his balloke" - the solution, a poultice from pounded barley and cumin mixed with honey applied to the offensive area. Another common but potentially harmful ailment was a skin disorder which is described 'Who so hap pe wilde fire...", in other words, ergotism, also known as St Anthony's fire. This was a reaction to ergot fungus in barley meal, a common source of food in the medieval period, which famously caused bewitchment. The suggested cure involved applying cooked and strained leeks to the face in addition to white wine, rye meal, and eysel. Ergot contained a chemical that made sufferers go beserk, largely because it caused gangrene and eventual loss of hands, feet and fingers. If not treated, and it rarely was in the Middle Ages, the poisoning led to the sensation of being burned at the stake. St Anthony's association with the ailment comes from the monks of the Order of St Anthony who achieved relative success at treating victims. To fund their charitable work, the same monks reared swine which partly explains the presence of the pigs in the image of St Anthony within the manuscript.

Saint Anthony

Saint Anthony is the first to appear in the front of the manuscript. While the oak trees, acorns (traditional fodder for pigs and many other birds and animals), and a deer (another sign of conception, growth and thereby health) are clearly visible, the rest of the saint is clearly scrubbed out. If it were not for the red liturgical colour (for martyrdom) of his robe and the presence of the pig (a common attribute), his identity would remain a mystery. Although further investigation is necessary to establish any underlying drawing that may have been obscured, as well as dating evidence, it is clear that this, and the other religious images, have been destroyed quite deliberately.

St James

He is followed by St James who chops down an oak tree with his bare hand (presumably to reveal the medicinal properties of the bark), St John the Baptist, also with an oak tree and, this time, rabbits (possibly to suggest the Christians and the persecuted church, or at least Christians fleeing temptation), and lastly, a Bishop.

While St John is left off lightly by the iconoclast, mysteriously, the Bishop gets the worst treatment leaving only the 2 candles either side visible, symbols of Christ's divine and human natures.

St John the Baptist

Bishop

The manuscript also includes catchword illustrations, possibly charms that were copied and cut into a piece of bark (no doubt oak) of apple peel and placed on the wound as a health-inducing charm.

A cockerill illustrating a recipe for staunching blood

The manuscript offers a fascinating glimpse of medieval medical practice in English history. From ailment to treatment, it provides a practical medical resource to the practitioner, through both its scholastic and its 'folk' medical content. Further research is clearly needed to establish just how unique this manuscript is, more evidence of why it was partially destroyed and, if others exist like it.

Arabic manuscript project - information online

The Wellcome Arabic manuscript project has a new webpage providing information on the project aims, project partners, standards, technology development, and more. This page will be updated regularly to show progress and make relevant documents available. The project plan is already available to view.

Image: WMS Arabic 461, f.1a

Item of the month – December 2009

As the season of good cheer inexorably draws nearer, it is customary to be bombarded with ‘essential’ lists of what to wear, buy or cook. If you fancy jumping off the consumerist bandwagon but would still appreciate a little festive guidance, why not print out and keep our Top 10 Tips for Surviving Christmas - 17th century-style.

1. How to reduce Subtraction of Money? Difficult in the short term, try making a New Year’s resolution and in the meantime if necessary resort to a syrup for melancholy

2. Surprise visitors with your idiosyncratic mince pie designs

3. If the mince pie pressure gets to you, try a spoonful of Lady Allen’s cordiall water (comforting and good for passions of the heart)

4. Or alternatively a bracing glass or two of cowslip wine

5. Hangover cure ‘for one that is paralettick’ – self-explanatory

6. Rejuvenate complexions dulled by too many mince pies and wine with a frog sperm and mercury face wash (‘Another water for the face’ on p.110)

7. House a mess? Your in-laws will be able to eat Christmas dinner off the floor after a wipe down with Mrs Mason’s spermaceti and camphor soft soap

8. But just in case, stock up with a good purge for any gastric problems

9. How to cook a husband - in case you leave it too late to order the turkey and have to make do with what's to hand

10. And for when it all inevitably gets too much… laudanum

For further top tips, try browsing the digital versions of the library’s 17th century domestic recipe manuscripts.

A Friday night curry

We are what we eat. This is most obviously true in the physical sense, but also culturally: our diet expresses our society and encodes a wide variety of cultural influences. Not only does our food say who we are now as a society; it also tells us of where we have been, of the history of our society and its encounters with other cultures, other gastronomic spheres, over time.

This is National Curry Week in the United Kingdom, and it would be hard to find a better example of food as a route into social history. The dominance of curry in the British diet – the Roast Beef of Old England is now eclipsed by Chicken Korma as a favourite dish – is of course the result of Britain’s encounters, by trade and then imperialism, with the Indian Subcontinent. As curry was assimilated into the British diet, it was transformed and becomes a cultural hybrid, located somewhere between the two culinary cultures. The delicate flavours that come from using fresh spices are eclipsed when the nearest fresh cumin is several thousand miles away and the cook is working with dried powders or paste: instead, we end up with a thicker, hotter sauce which becomes, at its most extreme, the brick-red paintstripper favoured as a rite of passage by the weekend beer monster.

It can be a surprise to see how early curry recipes begin to appear in domestic recipe books: long before Britain had a formal empire in India and long, long before mass immigration from the Subcontinent. One of the most influential early cookery books, Hannah Glasse’s The art of cookery, made plain and easy (1748), contains recipes for curries and pilaus:

"To make a Currey the India Way"
TAKE two Fowls or Rabbits, cut them into small Pieces, and three or four small Onions, peeled and cut very small, thirty Pepper Corns, and a large Spoonfull of Rice, brown some Coriander Seeds over the Fire in a clean Shovel, and beat them to Powder, take a Tea Spoonful of Salt, and mix all well together with the Meat, put all together in a Sauce-pan or Stew-pan, with a Pint of Water, let it stew softly till the Meat is enough, then put in a Piece of Fresh Butter, about as big as a large Walnut, shake it well together, and when it is smooth and of a fine Thickness dish it up, and send it to Table. If the Sauce be too thick, add a little more Water before it is done, and more Salt if it wants it. You are to observe the Sauce must be pretty thick.

This is no isolated exotic recipe: below it are two recipes for Pellow (pilau). Each ends with a note of hard-won, presumably bitter experience: the first one reads

"You must be sure to take great Care the Rice don't burn to the Pot."


By the nineteenth century, the British love affair with curry is well established. Recipe books in the collection such as MS.7111 contain instructions on how to mix spices to make curry powder. The powder might be applied to a wider variety of meats than we now expect, as we learn from the Johnson family recipe book (MS.3082) compiled during the 18th and early 19th century: on page 148 of this, we read

"A curry may be made of Meat, a Rabbit, Fowl or Lobster, cut in limbs or cucumbers. First [fry?] them a light brown, then put it in the Gravy to stew with the Juice of a Large Lemon, a little Salt and one Onion chopt small when almost finished stir in it nearly a large Spoonful of curry powder … Either dish your Rice up by itself or put it on a Dish & put your Curry in the middle – You may Thicken the Gravy with a few Blanchd Almonds."

It is doubtful whether this would be recognised as curry by anyone east of Suez, but such recipes added variety to the native diet and hinted at the great networks of trade and empire that fanned out from Britain at this time. Within this country, recipes would be exchanged and disseminated. One of the Library's quietly evocative items is a collection of loose recipes collected by a Mrs Turnbull in the mid-19th century (MS.5853): internal evidence suggests that in the 1820s she had been in India, but was now resident back in Surrey. The recipes, for things such as Dhall Bhât (MS.5853/86) or "Colonel R's curry" (MS.5853/91), speak of old India hands swapping recipes and of memories of the Subcontinent kept alive by cookery. It can surely only have been nostalgia that led her to preserve the recipe for a lethal compound to be spread on furniture as a preservative against termites, which has as one of its ingredients "1 quart of the worst Bazar Mustard" (MS.5853/85); unless Surrey has changed beyond all measure in the last 150 years.

The top illustration shows the frontespiece to Hannah Glasse's The art of cookery, made plain and easy, in an edition dating from c.1770. The lower illustration shows a curry powder recipe from MS.7111.

17th Century Recipe Book project completed

As we mentioned some time ago in a previous blog post, the Library has digitised 76 medical recipe books from its collections, and has now made available all the transcriptions of the recipe titles (transcriptions were created by Backstage Library Works). These titles are searchable via the Archives and Manuscripts catalogue. There are now tens of thousands of recipe titles containing original spelling and associated Library of Congress or MeSH subject headings to enable researchers to search within the text of these fascinating manuscripts. Individual pages and entire manuscripts are also available online in PDF format.

The following is MS 1, a manuscript of medicinal and culinary recipes (including a recipe for roast peacock, and another to cure bedwetting), from 1621. You can use Scribd to download this PDF as well. For best results, go to "More - View Mode - Slide mode" and view full screen.

MS1Acton_Grace

Cooking in the City

The Wellcome Library has recently acquired the "Book of Receipts for Cookery and Pastry 1732 & c." (MS.8687) started by Sarah Tully, who married Richard Hoare of the London banking family in 1732, and continued by other hands, presumably following her early death in 1736. The early pages of this volume are written out in a very fair hand and it seems quite likely that this was done either by Sarah Tully herself or a relative as a preparation for her wifely duties in running her husband’s household. Richard Hoare later became Lord Mayor of London and was knighted in 1745.

The volume contains the usual mixture of medical, household, veterinary and culinary recipes, and includes, pasted inside the front cover advertising broadside, printed in English in Venice, for the famous theriaca fina or Venice treacle, a honey- or molasses-based composition thought efficacious against poisoning, sold at the "Aquila Nera" [At the Sign of the Blak Eagle] in the Merceria San Salvatore.

The culinary recipes indicate a cosmopolitan and sophisticated household. Some connection with India, or at least the East India Company, is suggested by recipes for "A Loyn of Mutton Kebob’d" "pilau after the East Indian Manner", "currie powder" and “Indian pickle”. There is some evidence for European travel or contacts, with instructions on how "To make mackrony' [macaroni] - including "Parmason cheese", specified, and to prepare "Fromage Fondu". There are also details of how "To make Chocolate as prepared for the King". Whether these somewhat exotic items were actually prepared within the Hoare household may possibly be revealed by consulting the archives of C. Hoare and Co., private bankers, which include ten boxes of bills and receipts relating to Richard Hoare’s household expenditure, 1727-1754.

The medical recipes include "An Excellent rect. [receipt] for ye heartburn brot from Italy by the Duke of Shrewsbury", "Dr Radcliffe's Specifick for the Cholick"; "A Tincture for the Gout or Cholick in the Stomach" also ascribed to Dr Radcliffe, and "Mrs Masham's universal Purge" - which may or may not reflect the after-effects of the rich and exotic dishes described.

JISC funding for the Wellcome Arabic Manuscript Cataloguing Project

The Wellcome Library, Bibliotheca Alexandrina, and Kings College London have been awarded a grant by the JISC's Islamic Studies Catalogue and Manuscript Digitisation funding stream.

This collaborative project will create a searchable digital collection of Arabic manuscripts to be hosted by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt. Images and metadata will also be available from the Wellcome Library's website. The partners will be jointly designing and implementing a cataloguing system to enable the creation and management of descriptive metadata for Asian manuscripts. Cover-to-cover images of the manuscripts and TEI-compliant metadata will be available freely to search, view and reuse.

500 manuscripts from the 14th - 20th century sourced from the Wellcome Library's collections will be digitised and catalogued. This collection, containing major significant works pertaining to the history of Islamic medicine from the 9th - 20th century, is of great interest to scholars of Islamic medicine and science as well as historians of Islam. By virtually repatriating these works to the Middle East, the project contributes to the Bibliotheca Alexandrina's aim to become the premier Digital Library of Islamic scholarly resources and Arabic culture in the world.

Currently, the Wellcome Library holds only very basic MARC21 records for most of its Arabic manuscripts. In recent years, an online catalogue using the TEI MASTER metadata standard was created for a small sub-collection of the Arabic manuscripts (the Haddad collection), establishing some basic working principles for cataloguing these items. A new cataloguing tool will build on the existing Haddad system, extending its usefulness in many ways and reflecting changes in the new TEI standard. It will facilitate the comprehensive and accurate description of the manuscripts both as objects and text, including the ability to display and store non-standard Arabic characters and bi-directional text, and enabling full-text searching of the metadata in both English and Arabic. Open source, the tool will have an extensible structure that could be modified for other Asian scripts.

The Centre for Computing in the Humanties department at Kings College London will be bringing their expertise to bear on the design and development of this software, and the TEI schema to be implemented. The system will then be used by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina to carry out in-depth cataloguing of the manuscripts. Images and metadata will be made available primarily by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina via a dedicated website. The Wellcome Library will also provide access via its existing catalogue.

Example PDFs of four manuscripts from the Haddad collection are available online.

The Battle of the Haggis

Recent historical work casts doubt on the provenance of Scotland’s national dish, as reported on the BBC website on Monday 3rd August. Historian Catherine Brown has located a reference to haggis in Gervase Markham’s 1615 work The English Hus-Wife, which predates Burns’ celebration of the dish by more than a century and a half (and is, of course, held in the Wellcome Library).

The hunt is on, then, for more seventeenth-century references to haggis, to prove or disprove its Scots origins. The Wellcome Library’s recent launch of a digitisation programme is timed perfectly, making available as it will the contents of seventy recipe books from this period, indexed down to individual recipes and available for remote study via the internet. Already one haggis recipe is visible to the public, in an early seventeenth-century volume held as MS.635. In a faded but perfectly legible hand, the author instructs one in the art of making a haggis:

“Take a calves chaldron [entrails] and parboyle it; when it is cold mince it fine with a pound of beefe suet & penny loafe grated, some Rosemary, tyme, Winter Savory & Penny royall of all a small handful, a little cloves, mace, nutmeg,& Cinamon, a quarter of a pound of currants, a little suger, a little salt, a little Rosewater all these mixt together well with 6 yolkes of Eggs boyle it in a sheepes paunch and so boyle it”.

Does this help to settle the argument? Not quite: the snag is that we do not know who wrote MS.635 or where. This sounds like sitting on the fence, or maybe on Hadrian’s Wall: but all we can do is invite readers in to the Library or onto our website, to view the manuscript, try to work out its origins, and join in the argument.

The illustration shows Wellcome MS.635 open on the haggis recipe.