Curing Coughs and the Common Cold in Eighteenth-Century England
By Katherine Allen It happens at every university, every year, and is often known as ‘fresher’s flu’. This cocktail of viruses arrives at the start of term, along with students and their unprepared...
View ArticleNewspaper Remedies and Commercial Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Recipe Books
By Katherine Allen This post examines medical recipes and commercial medicine published in newspapers that were incorporated into recipe books. In a previous post, I discussed newspapers as sources of...
View ArticleSpa Culture, Recipes, and Eighteenth-Century Elite Healthcare
By Katherine Allen Earlier this month I took a day off from my thesis (or so I thought) and went to the spa at Bath. While relaxing in the rooftop pool I couldn’t help but imagine myself as an...
View ArticleCategories in a Database of Eighteenth-Century Medical Recipes
By Katherine Allen Creating a database is a valuable (though time-consuming!) methodological approach to the history of recipe collecting. The database that I constructed for my doctoral research...
View ArticleSpringtime in Recipe Books
By: Katherine Allen Spring has sprung and I can’t help but ponder the significance of spring for recipe collectors in the late 17th and 18th century. Citations of spring in recipes highlight the...
View ArticleRecipes Round-up: Research Presented at Scientiae and SSHM 2016
by Katherine Allen In early July I attended two conferences: Scientiae (on early modern science), and the Society for the Social History of Medicine (SSHM) conference. Both had an impressive range of...
View ArticleMovember: Men’s Health in Eighteenth-Century Recipe Collections
By: Katherine Allen November (or ‘Movember’) is men’s health awareness month, and it focuses on prostate cancer and depression, with the added bonus of moustaches. Movember didn’t exist in the...
View ArticleReflections on Reconstructing Eighteenth-Century Recipes
By Katherine Allen For the ‘What is a Recipe?’ Virtual Conversation on Saturday, 24th June, I reconstructed two eighteenth-century recipes from Mary Wise’s recipe book: a lip salve remedy and a pound...
View ArticleContributing to The Recipes Project – Five Years On
Editorial: This is the seventh of a series of reflection posts from Recipe Project contributors and editors. By Katherine Allen and Sally Osborn We’ve both had the privilege of being regular...
View Article‘Used With Constant Success’: Animal Ingredients in Eighteenth-Century...
It’s Halloween, so it’s fitting that I’m writing about slimes and sticky oozes, though somewhat misleading. This post considers three common animal-derived medicinal ingredients found in...
View Article