Receipt-Book, 17th century

Collection of medical receipts in English: by the same hand throughout.

Written in a small and legible upright English Secretary hand, similar to Alphabet No. 7 in Jenkinson's The later Court Hands in England, 1927.

The author has not been identified. His work is roughly arranged to cover diseases from head to foot, and his main authority is Galen, to whom he refers on many occasions. On fol. 241 is a 'Description of urines according to doctor Boord' (i.e. Andrew Boord or Borde [1490?-1549]). There are few personal details: on fol. 183, lines 17, 18 he speaks of a hard tumour only curable by amputation 'which I have remarked within these 30 years'. On fol. 157 he has a receipt for 'A drinke for the plague or pestilent fever proved in the yeare 1605', continuing on fol 157v, line 3, 'Also this medicine saved 38 commons of Windsor in the last greate plague 1595'.

Produced in Windsor?.

On fol. 56 are two receipts for 'the rickets in children'. The O.E.D. gives the first mention of 'Rickets' as being found in D. Whistler's De morbo puerili Anglorum published in 1645. In the Journal of the History of Medicine for 1954, pp. 407-419 however, J. J. Keevil in an article "The illness of Charles, Duke of Albany (later King Charles I) from 1600 to 1612: an historical case of Rickets", has shown that the word was at least known earlier. Keevil quotes Aubrey (Brief lives, Edited by O. I. Dick, 1949, p. xlviii) as saying that the word was derived from the name of a certain Doctor Ricketts of Newbury who, about 1620, was particularly successful in curing the disease. This quotation is itself taken from Aubrey's Natural History of Wiltshire (p. 74), first printed in 1847.