Guest Post: Bathing with Sheeps' Heads: The Sick Child in Early Modern England

Dr Hannah Newton is a Wellcome Trust Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Here, she provides insights into the treatment and experience of childhood illness in the early modern period, and overturns three enduring myths about the history of childhood.

In the late-seventeenth century, the London gentlewoman, Katherine Jones, described how to make ‘A Good Bath…for Children that have the Rickets’. She instructed, ‘Take five sheeps heads and livers, bruise them and boyle them in water a whole day’. Next, add a handful of ‘Rosemary, Bays, Wormwood, Fatherfew, Smallage, Mallows, knotgrass and red fennel’. When these were ‘boyled enough…put it into the Bathing tub, and let the child stay in as long as it can Endure according as you think fit’. She warned, ‘When the child comes out of the Bath, put it to bed and have a great care it take no cold’.

I encountered this recipe whilst leafing through the fragile pages of Katherine Jones’ collection of culinary and medicinal recipes, now housed in the Wellcome Library, and available for digital download from the website. It sparked a series of questions in my mind. How might Katherine’s child have felt about taking a bath bobbing with the heads of dead sheep? Were children’s medicines the same as those of adults? How did young patients respond emotionally to illness and the prospect of death? What role did mothers and fathers play in the care of ill children? These questions are addressed in my new book, The Sick Child in Early Modern England, 1580-1720. At this time, the illness or death of a child was common – almost a third of the young died before reaching the age of fifteen – and yet historians have rarely touched upon this subject. Taking the perspectives of doctors, parents, and children themselves, my book investigates the perception, treatment, and experience of childhood illness in England between approximately 1580 and 1720. It exposes three myths in the history of early modern childhood, outlined below.

Myth 1: Children were miniature adults.

According to popular legend, there was no concept of ‘childhood’ in medieval or early modern societies. In old paintings, children resemble little adults, dressed in the style of their elders. This view, which has largely fallen out of favour amongst historians, has seeped into the history of medicine – it is assumed that before the late nineteenth century, children and adults were treated using identical medicines. However, an examination of medical texts, recipe collections, and doctors’ casebooks, sheds doubt on this notion. The medical author ‘J.S’, declared in 1664, ‘children are to be cur’d in a different manner in them then they are in other Ages’. Their bodies resembled ‘soft wax’ – they were weak, warm, and full of moisture. This unique physiology meant that ‘a special regard is to be had to the Methods and Medicines, for Children by reason of the weakness of their bodies, cannot undergo severe methods or strong Medicines’. Instead of using the usual remedies of the time – vomits, purges, and bloodletting – children were to be treated with milder medicines, such as topical ointments and baths, and non-evacuating internal medicines. Of the 482 medicines for children that were listed in the collections of manuscript culinary and medical recipes that I analysed in the Wellcome Library and British Library, less than 4 percent were for emetics and bloodletting, and only about 15 percent were for purges and enemas. Evacuative treatments were to be avoided because they were ‘unpleasing, ful of pain and molestation to Children’, stated the physician Francis Glisson in 1651. Of course, there were occasions when these treatments were used – older children were more likely to be given vomits and purges than infants, and when the child was gravely ill, practitioners were sometimes prepared to risk administering a more aggressive remedy on the grounds that it might save the child’s life. But on the whole, gentler treatments were preferred.

As well as giving children different treatments, doctors and laypeople thought it was necessary to ‘limit…the strength, quality and quantity of the medicine’ by adapting the treatments in various ways. Doses were lessened for children, and the more powerful ingredients were often omitted. Mary Poppins’ technique of ‘adding a spoonful of sugar’, was another common practice. Francis Glisson noted that he sought to make the medicine ‘grateful & pleasing to the sick Child, & such as trouble not its Pallate’. The recipe book of Anne Glyd suggests that a medicine for ‘chin cough’ should be put into ‘hon[e]y’ or ‘what ever the child likes best’. Doctors knew that ‘children will not take bitter things’, and therefore either left these ingredients out, or disguised them by putting them into the child’s normal food or drink. To persuade children to submit to treatment, bribery was sometimes used. John Yorke complained that his nephew James ‘is…so refractory [about] taking what is proper for him’, that ‘[it is] a hard taske to govern him’. Yorke had to ‘use all my perwasion’ to get the child ‘to take what the Dr order’d’. Eventually through promising him a copy of Robinson Crusoe, the child agreed to take the medicine.

Myth 2: Parents did not love their children in the past.

It is often suggested that high rates of death in the early modern period discouraged parents from investing too much affection in their children. Fathers in particular, have been depicted as unemotional, aloof figures at this time, who spent little time with their children, and rarely showed much grief at their deaths. Contemporary diaries and letters provide a very different picture. During illness, fathers and mothers tended their children with devoted care. In 1679, the Anglican clergyman Isaac Archer recorded that he ‘sate by’ his six-year-old daughter Frances with his arm around her, and ‘helpt it all night’, offering her words of comfort. Witnessing one’s child suffer pain, grow weak and pale, and eventually die, provoked the most painful passions imaginable in parents. In 1647, the Yorkshire gentleman Ralph Verney nursed his eight-year-old daughter Pegg, who was suffering from a cancerous ulcer. He told his uncle, Dr Denton, ‘Poore childe you doe not know what miserie she hath endured’: she was so weak she ‘she cannot turne her selfe in her Bed’. He concluded his letter, ‘oh Dr I am so full of affliction that I can say noe more but pray for us’. When death finally arrived, the grief of parents was often so intense that they found it difficult to express. When Ralph Verney’s wife Mary found out that Pegg had died, she told him, ‘I am nott able to say one word more but that at this time there is nott a sadder creature in the world than thine own Deare M’. It appears that both mothers and fathers loved their children with the same intensity that we expect from parents today.

Myth 3: It is impossible to access the child’s experience.

It is notoriously difficult to investigate the experience of childhood in the seventeenth century. Children rarely left written records. However, there is one context in which their voices do survive: illness. Acutely aware of the likelihood of death, parents recorded the thoughts, words, and actions of their sick children in detail. The resulting evidence provides rare and intimate insights into the lives and deaths of early modern children. At eight o’clock one October evening in 1625 when Grace Wallington was washing the dishes, her three-year-old daughter Elizabeth asked her, ‘What doe you heere?’ Later that night when she was in bed, she said to her father Nehemiah, ‘Father I goe abroode tomorrow and bye [buy] you a plomee pie’. The reason these everyday sentences were recorded by Elizabeth’s father was that, ‘These were the last words that I did heere my sweete child speeke’, for the next day, she died. Some forty years later, John Vernon recalled the words of his dying son, twelve-year-old Caleb: he had spoken of his pet bird, saying ‘I will give it to my Sister Betty, who hath none, for Nancy [another sister] hath one already’.

Although these accounts may have been edited and censored by their parents, they do nonetheless shed light on children’s preoccupations. Children’s words also reveal their feelings for their parents. In the 1670s, six-year-old Jason Whitrow took his mother ‘by the hand, and said, Mother, I shall dye, oh that you might dye with me, that we might both go to the Lord together’. Daughters’ feelings for their fathers could be similarly deep. Thomas Camm described how his eight-year-old daughter Sarah lay in his arms during her illness in 1682, and told him ‘Oh! my dear Father, thou hast been very tender and carefull over me, and hast taken great pains with me in my Sickness…we shall meet in Heaven’. Christian beliefs about heaven were a source of unquantifiable comfort to all family members. While children rarely left written records, some sources do survive. When I was reading a recipe book in the Wellcome Library, I came across something very exciting: a child’s picture. It shows a woman cooking, perhaps boiling herbs for a medicine. Virtually indistinguishable from a modern child’s drawing, it brings the past to life.

Images:
- Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh, Collection of medical receipts, c. 1675-1710, Wellcome Library, MS.1340, 114v.
- Collection of cookery and medical receipts: written mainly by two compilers, c.1685-c.1725, Wellcome Library, MS.1796, 125v.

The Sick Child in Early Modern England, 1580-1720 (OUP, 2012) is available now. More information on the Wellcome Library's digitised recipe manuscripts is available through the Wellcome Library website.

Author: Dr Hannah Newton

Geffrye Museum Study Day: 'At Home with the World'

As part of their current exhibition At Home With the World, the Geffrye Museum is hosting a study day on 19th May, at which historians, specialists and curators will explore the themes of the exhibition in greater depth.

Topics discussed on the day will range from the development of Tudor and Stuart Gardens to orientalist interior decoration in the Victorian home. In one of the talks, Helen Wakely, Archivist, Wellcome Library, will draw upon our collections to reveal 'A Global Reader's Digest' - showing how health literature and recipe books from the 17th and 18th centuries reveal domestic responses in England to new global commodities, ideas and tastes.

More details on the study day are available from the Geffrye Museum's website (pdf).

Image: A girl pours coffee from a cup into a saucer. Colour halftone from an engraving by L. Marin, (Wellcome Library no. 25219i)

Duplicitous delicacies

Faking it in the world of manuscripts has a long, if not exactly distinguished, history.  Given the determination of ingenious fraudsters to play intellectual havoc with documentary evidence over the centuries, and the voracious collecting habits of the Wellcome Library’s founder Henry Wellcome, it isn’t surprising that the library turns out to have played its own unwitting part in the art of forgery.

We can’t lay claim to having discovered a fraud on the scale of the Hitler diaries hoax, but social historian of food culture and professional chef Ivan Day has recently unmasked an intriguing fake amongst our collection of 17^th-century recipe manuscripts.

Image of  artificial almond paste fruit courtesy of Ivan Day


Acquired by Henry Wellcome in 1931, Grace Acton’s short recipe book (MS.1) has long perplexed researchers and archivists with its strange handwritings, recipes and lack of obvious purpose.  Ivan has now analysed the text and script of the volume to reveal that it is most likely a 17^th-century notebook used by a 19^th- or early 20^th-century forger to create a ‘Carry On Banqueting’-style recipe collection.

The identity and motivations of the forger are unlikely ever to be discovered, but Ivan’s research sheds valuable light on a curious and problematic volume.

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus / Happy St David's Day

In honour of St David's Day, the national day of Wales, today we focus on one of the Library's Welsh holdings.

One of the fascinations of archive material in particular is the way that it makes things specific: takes large, overarching topics and presents them in terms of particular instances, anchored to real people and real places. Today, of course, we will be looking at an item that takes us to Wales: to Rhagatt Hall in the valley of the River Dee / Afon Dyfrdwy, just downstream of the small town of Corwen.

Over the years this blog has featured extensive coverage of the Library's seventeenth century recipe books. Those are, however, simply the tip of the iceberg: manuscript recipe books continued to be compiled throughout the eighteenth century and on into the nineteenth, finally beginning to fade from common use in the second half of the century (although they are by no means extinct even now). Like the seventeenth-century volumes, these later examples mingle medical, culinary and household management instruction, in varying proportions according to the compilers' preoccupations. Their main point of difference from the earlier books is in their greater use of printed cuttings: as time passes we see people less willing to transcribe every recipe in longhand, when they can cut out something from a printed source and paste it into the recipe book, and some from this late period are composed almost entirely of cuttings.

Today's Welsh item is a recipe book from this late period. MS.8459 is a small volume containing some 130+ pages of medical recipes and other very assorted material, which was formerly owned by Jane Margaret Lloyd (1822-1912) of Rhagatt Hall, daughter of Edward Lloyd of Berth and Rhagatt, and Frances Madocks, daughter of John Edward Madocks of Fron Iw, Denbighshire. It is unclear whether she had the volume compiled or simply came into ownership of it at some stage. Within the volume are recipes for medicines, including homoeopathic ones, and some reports on experiences of their use; there are also recipes for the treatment of cats and dogs. Inserted items include prescriptions: one, dispensed by a chemist in Rhyl, is for a Mrs. Ffoulkes, probably Jane Lloyd herself, since in 1861 she married the Ven. Henry Powel Ffoulkes, archdeacon of Montgomery. There are various cuttings, including at least one in Welsh, the latter forming part of a collection of material on the use of violet leaves to treat cancer. Another cutting provides the lyrics to some popular songs, one of which - "The Lum Hat" - takes us into the realm of broad Scots dialect. Finally, taking us a very long way from Wales indeed, there is an invitation from the Officers and Council of the Japan Society to a Mr Herbert Tinker, asking him to an event also attended by His Excellency the Japanese Minister in the United Kingdom (this would be Count Hayashi Tadasu, who served as Minister from 1900 to 1905 and then as Ambassador for a further year). The presence of the last item, without any explanation, is evidence of the sheer unpredictability of archive material!

Archive material may be unpredictable: but one thing that one can predict, without much fear of contradiction, is that the Library's holdings are sufficiently various for pretty much any subject or part of the world to be represented somewhere in them. This one item is, of course, just a little sample of our Welsh material: the full list of hits on the words "Wales" and "Welsh" in the archives catalogue comes to over 8000. (Our sources guides on British Local History and Topographical Photographs provide a more manageable introduction.) On this day of all days, have a look through them.

Images:
1/ Daffodil, copyright Albert Bridge; from the Geograph website and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.
2/ Title page and start of contents, MS.8459.
3/ Material on treatment of cancer, MS.8459.
4/ Inserted prescription envelope, MS.8459.
5/ Valley of the River Dee, near Rhagatt Hall, copyright Jonathan Billinger; from the Geograph website and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

New issue of Wellcome News

Published four times a year, Wellcome News contains up-to-date articles highlighting the Wellcome Trust's wide-reaching science and public engagement activities, grant schemes, policies and more.

The latest issue's 'From the Archive' feature, highlights one of our digitised recipe manuscripts (MS.7113), compiled by Lady Ann Fanshawe in the 17th century.

The issue also contains an extra supplement, Wellcome News 1936, to tie in with the Trust's 75th anniversary. The supplement imagines how Wellcome News might have looked in the year of the Trust's founding, and is inspired by material from the Library's collections.

Both Wellcome News - and its 1936 supplement - are available to download from the Wellcome Trust's website.

Would you like a Flake with that?

Here in central London it's another warm, sunny day as a record-breaking dry spring shades into summer. The approach of the weekend, of course, gives the British climate the chance to spring a downpour on us all at the time of maximum inconvenience; but let's not harbour such negative thoughts. (Let us also, for the moment, put aside the nagging worry about what a long dry spell like this means for climate change.) Let's focus, instead, on how the weather has turned out perfectly for the UK's National Ice-Cream Week.

We've written many times on this blog about the Wellcome Library's holdings relating to food: pies, curry (twice: here and here), chocolate, cheese, sausages.... the list goes on. It's no surprise, then, that ice-cream also features in our holdings. What is special is that, as far as food historians know, the Library holds the oldest recipe for ice-cream in this country - so in a sense National Ice Cream week, the choc-ice, the 99 and the Mivvi all start here.

Our seventeenth-century recipe-book collection (now digitised) is a wealth of food-historical facts, and it's here that we find the ice-cream recipe: in the recipe book of Lady Ann Fanshawe (1625-1680), MS.7113. Lady Ann was the wife of Sir Richard Fanshawe (1608-1666), a prominent Royalist who had undergone imprisonment and exile during the Commonwealth and was rewarded for his dedication to the Stuart cause, on the Restoration of the monarchy, with the position of Ambassador to Spain. (This was the first permanent resident embassy sent abroad by the English crown: previous ambassadors had been sent as envoys to carry out particular negotiations and had then returned home.) Lady Ann travelled with him and the recipes she compiled show the signs of her Spanish experiences, with New World products such as chocolate entering her kitchen. A more detailed description of her recipe compilation can be found in an article by David Potter in the the journal Petits Propos Culinaires (David Potter, “The Household Receipt Book of Ann, Lady Fanshawe”, Petits Propos Culinaires, 80 (March 2006), pp. 19–32) within the Library: for now we will focus on one particular recipe, that for ice-cream. It sounds serviceable, although some of the flavouring is a little strange to modern tastes:

To Make Icy Cream

Take three pints of the best cream, boyle it with a blade of Mace or else perfume it with orang flower water or Ambergreece, sweeten the Cream, with sugar[,] let it stand till it is quite cold, then put it into Boxes, e[i]ther of Silver or tinn, then take, Ice chopped into small peeces and put it into a tub and set the Boxes in the Ice covering them all over, and let them stand in the Ice two hours, and the Cream Will come to be Ice in the Boxes, then turn them out into a salvar [salver = dish] with some of the same seasoned Cream, so sarve [serve] it up to the Table.

Provided that you have some of the best cream available, there's a project to try out over the weekend: we will, however, excuse you if you choose to flavour the ice-cream with something more to your taste than mace, ambergris or orange-flower water. We would be remiss if we didn't point out that ice-cream can be a vehicle for bacteria, and that it should be prepared and stored hygenically. The twentieth-century papers of Sir Herbert Chalke (1897-1979), held as GC/200, include sobering information on potential contamination: for example, his 1939 article "The chemical and bacteriological examination of ice cream samples" (in Medical Officer, 24 Jun 1939), held as GC/200/D/2/6). Wash your hands well. Let's not end on a negative note, however. Still amongst our twentieth-century papers, we find Sir Weldon Dalrymple-Champneys (1892-1980) (papers held as GC/139) giving in 1951 what is described as the "Inaugural address at the 2nd National Conference of the Ice Cream Alliance" (GC/139/F.19). That's an organisation that, in the current hot spell, most of us would sign up to.

Images:
1/ Girl eating an ice-cream (British readers will recognise this as a 99; some day, food historians will puzzle over why a cornet with a Flake was called this), from Wellcome Images (N0031317).
2/ Lady Ann Fanshawe's ice-cream recipe, from MS.7113. (A digitised image of the entire opening can be seen here.)

Here's one we made earlier...

As the latest issue of the Wellcome Trust's Big Picture tackles the themes of Food and Diet, we thought we would set a culinary challenge for chef Zack Mila. Faced with the Library's collection of 17th recipe manuscripts - and an absence of details, such as cooking times and temperatures - could Zack bring a centuries old recipe to life?

Click on the film above to see how Zach - aided by the Wellcome Library's Helen Wakely - got on (and if you want to look at the recipe in more detail, this link from our catalogue will take you to a digitised edition of it).

Video by Barry J Gibb, Multimedia Editor, Wellcome Trust

Archives and Manuscripts cataloguing, March 2011

Last month's archive cataloguing saw the release of three complete archive collections, as well as various manuscripts and supplementary items. The highlights are described below.

John Wilson Boag (1911-2007), radiation physicist and peace campaigner: papers of the influential radiation physicist and peace campaigner Jack Boag (1911-2007) were transferred to the Library last month thanks to the good offices of his colleague, G. Gordon Steel, the National Cataloguing Unit of the Archives of Contemporary Scientists and the Centre for Science Archives @ The Science Museum. With radiation hitting the headlines for all the wrong reasons recently, it is timely that the Library is releasing a new archive collection on this topic, which takes its place beside our other archive resources on radiology, radiotherapy and radiobiology. Although a rather patchy representation of Boag’s career, the eight boxes of his papers do contain interesting material relating his early work at the Radiotherapeutic Research Unit, Hammersmith Hospital in the 1940s-1950s, and later research, including at the Institute of Cancer Research; in addition, material relating to lectures and papers that Boag gave during the 1990s on the history of x-rays and radiation dosimetry. (PP/JWB)

Captain George Blair, RAMC (1917-1979): material mainly relating to Blair's service in World War II and period as a prisoner of war of the Japanese: letters to and from family members, friends and relatives, personal documentation, photographs, and bound copy of a typescript thesis by Blair on malnutrition among PoWs in the Far East. The letters from him to his family give some details of his experiences, though some correspondence takes the form of preprinted formulaic postcards. His family and friends' letters give details of life on the home front and in other parts of the world. His sister Lydia's letters often mention her experiences as a Kitchen Supervisor at King's Cross Hospital, Dundee. (PP/GBL)

Otto Neubauer (1874-1957), German biochemist: papers relating mainly to his experiments on liver and kidney function prior to his leaving Nazi Germany for Britain. (GC/207)

Sir John Robert Vane (1927-2004), pharmacologist: two audio visual items were added to Vane’s papers, both recordings on CD: namely, a 1960 Ciba Foundation symposium (PP/JRV/F/8), and the speeches made in 1955 at Sir Henry Dale's 80th birthday dinner, 1955 PP/JRV/F/9), which include numerous anecdotes on the history of physiology and physiologists.

Adolf Stempel (fl.1868-1882): gymnastics notebook, giving highly detailed and numbered instructions on gymnastic excercises, movements and floor routines to be performed, and information on various events and competitions in London (including at the Orion gymnasium and the Bow and Bromley Institute). The notebook also includes several intricate diagrams for the excercises. (MS.7981)

Anna Maria Meysey of Shakenhurst Hall, Worcestershire: domestic recipe book including medical and culinary material and also instructions for household tasks (including one how to wash silk stockings). Late 18th – early 19th century. (MS.8685)
8685)

German Household Remedy Book: 17th century medical recipe book and herbal including recipes for cures for common illnesses and for veterinary medicine; also various remedies for the plague. The herbal section includes information on the properties of quinces, lemons, lime, aloe and sage, as well as herbs from the New World such as sarsaparilla. (MS.8454)

“Chyromancy or Palmestrye. Also Physiognomy and Metoposcopie”: an English manual of practical chiromancy or palmistry dated 1648, which will be described in more detail in a future blog post. (MS.8727)

In addition, as noted previously, work continues on the retroconversion of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapists catalogue (SA/CSP). Finally, in an earlier posting we flagged up the impending release of the final tranche of Francis Crick's papers (PP/CRI). There has been a slight change of plan here: the catalogue is completed but rather than release them at once the opportunity is being taken to digitise the papers immediately, bringing them forwards in our digitisation schedule, which means that there will be no need at a later date to take them out of circulation again for 2-3 months, as has been the case for the other Crick material to be digitised, and thus once this material is finally opened to the public it will stay opened. As soon as photography is completed these papers will be released, and an announcement will be made on this blog to herald the end of this long-running project.


The image of the X-ray warning sign at the head of this posting comes from Wellcome Images, image no.C0022404.

The Sausage follows the Flag

Draw up a list of iconic British foods: menu items that radiate comfort and Britishness to the native and the outsider alike. The chances are that sausages will be somewhere on that list – not, perhaps, as charged with emotional meaning as the roast beef of old England, the haggis or the nice cup of tea, but somewhere well up in the top ten. When Dennis the Menace or his contemporaries tuck into a slap-up meal, it’s likely to feature a huge pile of mashed potatoes with sausages sticking perkily out of it. When C.S. Lewis brings his characters back to Narnia after dangerous adventures in the frozen north and a sinister underworld in The Silver Chair, it’s a meal of piping-hot sausages bursting with meat that really signify a return to home, safety and comfort.

British Sausage Week, running from Monday 1st to Sunday 7th November, celebrates this key component of the national cuisine. For regular readers of this blog it will come as no surprise that the Wellcome Library has relevant holdings: diet is a major contributor to health or ill-health, and what we eat, accordingly, has always been well represented in the Library.

We can begin, as so often when food is the subject, with our recipe books, and in particular with the mostly seventeenth-century ones now digitised. Searching these for “sausage” yields no hits but all this indicates is a need to take one step back: look for “force meat” and the search is more fruitful. To take an example, MS.7998 – one of a series of recipe books from the Godfrey and Faussett families of Heppington, Nackington, Kent – describes how meat is chopped fine and mixed with suet, breadcrumbs and spices to make a substance that can be rolled into meatballs and cooked that way, or – of course – put into a tubular casing (at this stage, probably the animal’s own intestines) and made into sausages. The presence of breadcrumbs, incidentally, is a demonstration to our coeliac readers of why it can be so hard to find gluten-free sausages; the ratio of bread and other padding to meat, of course, is an indicator of the quality and cost of the sausage.

Coming right up to date, the Library’s Ephemera collection continues to document the British diet, in part by scooping up supermarkets’ flyers and leaflets. From 1994 we hold a leaflet issued by Tesco to promote their Superior Sausage Selection and offering membership in the British Sausage Appreciation Society. The varieties span the globe: Tandoori Pork, French & Garlic, Mexican (featuring chilli and mixed beans as well as meat) and Venison Game, as well as the Traditional Pork Sausage and the Hot Mustard Porker. Fast forward to this year, and another Tesco leaflet gives the recipe for a sweet potato, red onion and sausage frittata (rather appetising, we must say, although one blenches at how Dennis the Menace might react to the word “frittata”). Notably, by now the recipe comes with indications of its precise dietary content, with fat, salt and so forth carefully calibrated.

It’s been said that the slap-up feeds enjoyed by characters in British comics reflect their origins in the years of war and austerity, when abundance of food was a distant memory or a dream of the remote future. The Narnia books mentioned earlier, too, have their roots in these years: the initial adventure, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, takes place when the children in it are evacuated to a country house to avoid the Blitz. When describing the sausages in The Silver Chair, Lewis states explicitly that these were proper sausages, simply full of meat and not mostly bread and sawdust, expecting his readers to recognise that war and austerity had not been good for sausages and had led to a need to make a little meat go a very, very long way by increasing dramatically the amount of padding in the mixture. It’s been pointed out by many historians that government control of supplies, coupled with the scientific input of nutritionists (see, for example, the papers of Robert Alexander McCance and Elsie May Widdowson in the Library’s archives and manuscripts collection) meant that the British public was better fed during the Second World War than before it. There was little spare for luxury or self-indulgence, however. Also in our Ephemera collections is a Ministry of Food leaflet “Suggestions for Breakfast”. The leaflet makes it plain that today’s office workers breakfasting on coffee at the station in the course of their commute would be frowned upon:

A good breakfast every day is the first rule in the book of health.
Get up early enough to enjoy breakfast. A cup of tea and a morsel of toast gulped down with one eye on the clock is no use to anyone. Breakfast is an important meal for all of us, but especially important for growing school children and young factory workers.

The leaflet sets out various ways of getting sufficient protein other nutrients, some rather surprising: the “Summer Breakfast Dish”, for example, is actually a proper Swiss Bircher-Muesli, as devised by Dr Maximilian Bircher-Benner (a world away from the dry commercially produced muesli now available in packets), not something that fits with clichéd ideas about the insular British diet of this time. Meat, however, occurs mostly in the form of bacon, eked out with a lot of potato or flour to make it go further. The sausage packed too concentrated a meaty punch to be easily permissible or possible at this time, except in the disappointing form described by C.S. Lewis: restoration to its rightful role in the full English breakfast would have to wait for the end of austerity.

With occasional interruptions like this caused by force majeure, however, the sausage has had pride of place in the full English wherever British stomachs have followed the Union Jack. In the years between the First and Second World Wars Sir Robert McCarrison served in the Indian Medical Service in what is now the state of Tamil Nadu. A photograph album in his papers at the Wellcome Library illustrates his lifestyle – the bungalow in wooded hills, the gravel drive, the garden combining British floral borders with tropical foliage and palm trees. It’s a window into the last days of the Raj, a scene familiar to anyone who has read Paul Scott’s novels or seen the television adaptation of The Jewel in the Crown. Amongst his correspondence, we find a letter further demonstrating how a little bit of Britain was maintained in the subcontinent. The letterhead proudly spells out that this correspondence comes from “H. Cooter, Ham and Bacon Curer, Sausage Manufacturer, Direct Importer of Danish Bacon, Hunters’ English Hams and Half Hams, Maypole Dairy Company’s Margarine, Jams and Marmalade.” Also based in Tamil Nadu, Mr. Cooter could provide most of the components of the full English breakfast from one source. He proclaims his firm to be under the no-doubt-grateful patronage of the Governor of Madras – and, one presumes, many other colonials keen for a taste of home.

We mentioned at the start the iconic role of the sausage in British cuisine. There is, of course, another culinary tradition in which the sausage is perhaps even more important, that of Germany. German cooking includes a huge variety of types of Wurst - xenophobic stereotyping in Britain reduces the German diet to beer, sausages and sauerkraut. Another item in the Ephemera collection, from another British colony, perhaps acknowledges this primacy. Irvine and Stevenson of Dunedin, New Zealand, proudly proclaim in a late 19th-century flyer that they manufacture “Real German Sausages… prepared by an approved German Expert”. As well as being “A Perfect Food – A Real Delicacy”, these are also “Guaranteed perfectly pure of the finest materials and free from all sinews and indigestable [sic] matter.” You can’t ask for more than that. However, the nervous Briton might well cast his or her mind back to an article in the Edinburgh Medical Journal in 1856 in which W.H. Michael set out a “Case of fatal poisoning by German sausage.” There is, no doubt, a new Richard Hannay adventure to be written around this tragedy, featuring dastardly plots for the control of Europe, sinister Continental masterminds foiled by a sock to the jaw, and a rousing affirmation of the superiority of British pork products.

Images, from top:
1/ 19th century image of a butcher's shop, from Wellcome Images.
2/ MS.7998, page showing force meat recipe.
3/ Tesco recipe leaflet, 2010 (detail), from the Library's Ephemera collection.
4/ Ministry of Food leaflet “Suggestions for Breakfast”, from the Library's Ephemera collection.
5/ Sir Robert McCarrison (right), Lady McCarrison and a friend, in Southern India: from a photograph album in the McCarrison papers in the Library's Archives and Manuscripts collection.
6/ Irvine and Stevenson advertising leaflet, late 19th century, from the Library's Ephemera collection.

Montezuma's gift

How many words of Nahuatl do you know – the language of the Aztecs?

And how many words of this complex, agglutinative language (spoken in various modern forms by about 1.5 million people across Central America today) do you think have made it into English?

Well, you know one at least, although you may not have known its source. When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in Mexico, like explorers throughout history they encountered plants, animals and products that they had never seen before, and the simplest way to refer to them was to borrow the native name for them. Among these products was a dark, bitter drink made by fermenting the fruit pods of a small tree, Theobroma Cacao. This they named “chocolata”: according to the most common theory, a rendering in Spanish of the Nahuatl word Xocolatl, “bitter water”. (There are other theories: one derives it from chicolatl, “beaten drink”, describing the way that it was beaten to a froth before drinking. However, its Mesoamerican roots are not in dispute.)

The original Xocolatl was a bitter, spicy drink, flavoured with vanilla, chilli and other spices such as achiote (a natural red food colourant). From that to today’s sweet chocolate bar is a long way, but the basic ingredient and its preparation remain the same. The cacao pods (now mostly grown in West Africa) are fermented, then roasted, and the resulting product liquidised to form cocoa butter. From this basic substance, the world makes food or drinks, dark or milky, sweet or bitter, according to what is added to it and the processes through which the mixture goes. In the UK this week, National Chocolate Week celebrates this variety. In the Wellcome Library, needless to say, we hold numerous relevant items that can contribute to the festival…

As we said above, the first Europeans to encounter chocolate were the Spanish conquerors of Mexico, and it is thus through Spain that chocolate enters the European diet and other European languages. Unsurprisingly, then, one of the earliest mentions of it in our manuscript holdings comes from someone based in Spain. Lady Ann Fanshawe, whose husband was posted by Charles II as ambassador to Madrid as a reward for his loyalty during the Civil Wars, compiled a book of recipes which is now held here as MS.7113: many of the recipes are annotated to record that she learned them in Spain. On August 10th 1665, according to the marginal note, she transcribed a recipe for chocolate. The recipe is crossed out, perhaps indicating that it was unsatisfactory, but pinned to the page is a little sketch of “the same chocolaty pottes that are mayd in the Indes”, a little round-based pot with a long handle to take in one hand whilst one whips the mixture with the whisk shown next to it. Other chocolate recipes, which the compilers seem to have found more satisfactory, occur in the recipe books of Philip Stanhope, 1st Earl of Chesterfield (1584-1656) (MS.761), compiled from the 1630s onwards, and an anonymous recipe book compiled from 1650 onwards (MS.6812). As is so often the case, our digitised seventeenth century recipe books are a fertile source of recipes.

There are good physiological reasons for chocolate’s popularity. It contains alkaloids such as theobromine and phenethylamine, which have been linked to increased serotonin levels in the brain: the Aztecs believed it to fight fatigue, doubtless for this reason. The feelgood effect of a chocolate hit is no illusion. Like most foreign substances that become a craze, however, it has been the subject of considerable suspicion over the years. We know that over-indulgence in our modern solid chocolate can lead to obesity, due to the sugar that is added in the manufacturing process. However, the core ingredient itself, the cocoa butter, has also been suspected (and indeed the theobromine in it does make it toxic to some animals, cats and dogs in particular). In our rare books collection, we hold a 1662 publication by Henry Stubbe, The Indian nectar, or, A discourse concerning chocolata, in which, as Stubbe says, the nature of the cacao-nut, and the other ingredients of that composition, is examined, and stated according to the judgment and experience of the Indians, and Spanish writers, who lived in the Indies, and others. Stubbe is particularly exercised by the fattiness of the nut, and also by its heat-producing qualities, discussing in detail whether it should be drunk hot or cold (“I found it [when cold] to offend my stomach” – p.113) and the correct time of day to take it:

As to the time of taking it, it is held (by the Spaniards) the most fit time to take it in the Morning, and Supper being digested, and the Body fresh, and the Stomach empty to receive it. (p.114)

A cup of chocolate is no light matter, it is clear, and due precautions must be taken: the Spanish, he notes, say that

after [they] have drunk Chocolata, they strictly prohibit all manner of Drink; for when Beer or Wine be drunk after it, there do frequently ensue very dangerous Diseases, and Symptomes. (p.117)

A similar caution is expressed in a work by M. Duncan published in Leipzig in 1707, Von dem Missbrauch heisser und hitziger Speisen und Geträncke, sonderlich aber des Caffes, Schockolate, und Thees (stated to be a translation of a French work). Chocolate and other hot drinks are seen as unhealthy fads, which fashion-victims indulge in only to their long-term detriment: the frontespiece shows young women gathering to drink these fashionable beverages even though, as the alarmist verse beneath claims, they are coming close to death by doing so.

Who would have thought that the humble cup of cocoa could be such a walk on the wild side? We seem, as a culture, to have overcome any scruples about the dangerous American bean pretty thoroughly by now. Indeed, by the late nineteenth century chocolate is being used as a vehicle to make medicines palatable. In the archives of Henry Wellcome’s drugs company we find a large certificate of merit (WF/M/C/13) awarded by the Sanitary Institute of Great Britain for various Burroughs Wellcome products involving extract of malt. Anyone who has read Winnie the Pooh knows how unpalatable that could be, so it is no surprise that one of the mixtures involves chocolate. If Milne had made Kanga offer Roo his extract of malt in this form, it might well have gone down more easily (and Tigger might have been poisoned by the theobromine rather than finding he liked extract of malt: so, a narrow escape).

From dangerous drug to emotional crutch for anyone having a Bridget Jones day, the European encounter with chocolate has taken some strange turns: a changing relationship that can be tracked in the Library’s collections. As a bonus Nahuatl fact, we can add that other words to make it into English from the language of the Aztecs include chilli, avocado and tomato. It will be no surprise to our readers, we suspect, that whenever National Chilli Week or British Avocado Month take place, we will have items from the collection to illustrate both…

Images, from top:
1/ Chocolate, from Wikimedia Commons.
2/ Lady Ann Fanshawe's recipe book, MS.7113: detail, MS.7113/87.
3/ The Indian Nectar... by Henry Stubbe, title page.
4/ Von dem Missbrauch heisser und hitziger Speisen und Geträncke, sonderlich aber des Caffes, Schockolate, und Thees, frontespiece.

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)

Library Year In Review 2009 goes live

Last week the Library launched its latest Year In Review. This year, we have opted for an electronic-only format, and the PDF of the Review is available for viewing and downloading from our website.

2009 was the Library's busiest year to date, with visitor numbers topping the 38,000 mark. The Review focuses on services for our in-person visitors, and also showcases a number of initiatives which are available via the web for our users worldwide.

We hope you enjoy the Review. As ever we are keen to hear from our users about their research and how they make use of the Library and its resources, so please feel free to get in touch.

Download the Year In Review 2009 [PDF 3.3 MB] (Right click to save)