Items

Title: Spider, Hortus Sanitatis
Description: Even arachnophobes may be well-disposed to this spider, who dates to the 1499 publication of the Hortus Sanitatis (here he appears in our 1517 edition). Spiders were often depicted in early printed books using pictographic shapes, drawing on an earlier medieval tradition. Here, our spider scrambles up a tightly circular web, his thorax evenly studded in a grid design. He may not look scary, but the accompanying text offers strong evidence that this spider might have caused worry, just as J.K. Rowling's giant spider Aragog did. The authors of this early modern tome included several botanical remedies for spider bites.
Collection: How to Pass Your O.W.L.s at Hogwarts: A Prep Course

Title: Nearly 50 Years the Favorite: Piso's Cure a Medicine for Coughs Colds Etc.
Description: Trade card advertising Piso's Cure featuring a scene of two men constructing or deconstructing a wooden dock on the Allegheny River. A red-wheeled wheelbarrow on the bank holds wooden planks. There is an island in river that has a red-and-white house. There are forested hills on the farther shorelines. The back is a blank template for a postcard.
Conditions Cured (LC): Cold (Disease), Cough
Subjects (LC): Advertising—Medicine, Carpenters, Carts And Carriages, Hats, Housing, Islands, Marshes, Nature, Trees, Water, Woodworkers
ID: WH329
Collection: William H. Helfand Collection of Pharmaceutical Trade Cards

Title

De symmetria partium in rectis formis humanorum

Description

Albrecht Dürer, printmaker and painter of the German Renaissance, was equally famous during his lifetime for contributions to the study of mathematics and proportion. In this text, Dürer treats the arithmetic and geometrical constructions of bodies, largely at rest. Numerous woodcuts represent bodies male and female in various sizes and ages, and register their measurements. The ideas expressed in the De symmetria and the two complimentary volumes that followed, also on human proportion, were widely influential on artists and anatomists for centuries to come. This 1532 text in Latin contains the first two books of the results of this research, first published in German in 1528 as Vier Bücher von menschlicher Proportion (Four Books on Human Proportion.) Dürer died shortly after receiving the first proofs of the German edition; the remaining publication details were completed by his friends. Our copy is bound in stamped pigskin, with a front panel illustrating Jacob’s ladder and a back panel depicting the baptism of Christ. The woodcut monogram Dürer developed in 1497 to protect his work from piracy is visible on the title page.

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Subjects (LC)

Anatomy, Artistic, Anthropometry, Early works to 1800, Human figure in art, Medical illustration, Medicine, Proportion (Anthropometry), Proportion (Art), Wood-engraving—16th century

Title: Plague Visitation Scene

Title: Cookbook : manuscript, circa 1700s and 180
Description: Manuscript containing mostly culinary recipes from the 18th and 19th centuries. The bulk of the recipes are from the early 18th century and written in two hands. Most concern fruit preserving (23 recipes) and fruit and flower wines (10 recipes). Other early 18th-century recipes include little cakes, stewed dishes, fried pasties, pickles and souses, a collar of beef, potted beef, other meat dishes, and a few medicinal receipts. Three later recipes are also found; one is from the late 18th century or later, and the other two are copied from Eliza Acton's Modern Cooking for Private Families, published in 1846.
Subjects (LC): Cooking, English, Medicine -- Formulae, receipts, prescriptions, Traditional medicine -- Formulae, receipts, prescriptions, Manuscripts, English -- 18th century, Manuscripts, English -- 19th century

Title: West Port murders; or, an authentic account of the atrocious murders committed by Burke and his associates, containing a full account of all the extraordinary circumstances connected with them. Also, a report of the trial of Burke and M'Dougal, with a description of the execution of Burke, his confessions, and memoirs of his accomplices, including the proceedings against Hare, &c.
Description: Disbound book. Engraved frontispiece (artist, George Andrew Lutenor; engraver, Thomas Clerk). Illustrated with engravings. Includes drawings by Walter Geikie. Has broadside titled "The West Port Murders" tipped in (14 cm.).
Collection: The Resurrectionists

Title: Ayer's Cherry Pectoral Cures Colds, Coughs & all Diseases of the Throat and Lungs
Description: Trade card advertising Ayer's Cherry Pectoral featuring an oversized bottle labeled Ayer's with two children at its side. The boy, on the left, is sitting and touching the bottle with his right hand and holding a spoon in his left. He is wearing a white tunic and red-and-white-striped socks. The girl, on the right, is standing, ostensibly trying to reach the top of the open bottle with her right hand, which holds a spoon. She is wearing a white, frilled dress, white stockings, a white bonnet tied with a blue ribbon, and blue Mary Janes. There is an enlarged branch with cherries on it in the top, left corner, and another, smaller sprig in the bottom, center. The back has images of two hands, one pouring a bottle, and one holding a spoon to catch the liquid. Listed on the back are the ailments Ayer's Cherry Pectoral cures.
Conditions Cured (LC): Asthma, Catarrh, Cold (Disease), Cough, Croup, Influenza, Laryngitis, Throat—Diseases, Tuberculosis, Whooping Cough
Subjects (LC): Advertising—Medicine, Bottles, Cherry, Children, Children's Clothing, Clothing And Dress, Nature, Spoons
ID: WH119
Collection: William H. Helfand Collection of Pharmaceutical Trade Cards

Title: Nature's Pleasant Laxative
Description: Folded trade card printed on two sides advertising Syrup as Figs as a laxative. Edges are decoratively trimmed.
Subjects (LC): Fig trees, Harvesting, Orchards
Manufacturer: California Fig Syrup Co (San Francisco (Calif.))
Language: English
ID: WH242
Collection: William H. Helfand Collection of Pharmaceutical Trade Cards

Title: Ayer's Cathartic Pills: the Country Doctor
Description: Trade card advertising Ayer's Cathartic Pills featuring an African-American man sitting with a little girl on his knee and a little boy sitting on the ground by his feet. The man is in formal attire, including a hat and eyeglasses, and is holding a pill box with the word Ayer's on it in his left hand and a pill in his right hand. The little girl is in a red-and-white, polka-dot dress and is holding a leaflet titled Ayer's Pills. The boy is looking up at them and holds something in his right hand. At the man's feet and the boy's knees is an open medicine case filled with Ayer's products. The back has an image of a bottle with name of the manufacturer on it: J.C. Ayer and lists what ailments Ayer's Cathartic Pills cure.
Conditions Cured (LC): Biliary Tract—Diseases, Constipation, Diarrhea, Dizziness, Dysentery, Edema, Gout, Headache, Heartburn, Hemorrhoids, Indigestion, Jaundice, Nausea, Neuralgia, Rheumatism
Subjects (LC): Advertising—Medicine, African American Children, African American Men, African Americans, Children, Children's Clothing, Clothing And Dress, Eyeglasses, Families, Men's Clothing, Old Age
ID: WH120
Collection: William H. Helfand Collection of Pharmaceutical Trade Cards

Title: The Toll Gate
Description: Trade card advertising a book titled "The Sexual System and its Derangements" featuring an image of a donkey in a barn. A man's head peeks out from a window overlooking the donkey from within the barn. There is a fence between the viewer and the donkey that seems to read "Buffalo NY." There are various hidden images in the leafless trees that surround the barn. The back praises the book being advertised.
Conditions Cured (LC): Asthenia, Depression, Dizziness, Fatigue
Subjects (LC): Advertising—Medicine, Animals, Donkeys, Hats, Trails, Trees, Wooden Fences
ID: WH254
Collection: William H. Helfand Collection of Pharmaceutical Trade Cards

Title: A laconic narrative of the life and death of James Wilson, known by the name of Daft Jamie; to which is added, a few anecdotes relative to him and his old friend Boby Awl, an idiot who strolled about Edinburgh for many years
Description: Chapbook that has been disbound and mounted in a window-pane style. Illustrated.
Collection: The Resurrectionists

Title: The Morse Indian Root Pills
Description: Trade card advertising Morse's Indian Root Pills featuring text explaining why potential customers should take them. The back is blank save for linear designs on the top and bottom.
Subjects (LC): Advertising—Medicine
ID: WH305
Collection: William H. Helfand Collection of Pharmaceutical Trade Cards

Title: Ayer's Cherry Pectoral Cures Coughs Colds &c: Penn's Treaty
Description: Trade card advertising Ayer's Cherry Pectoral featuring an image of a meeting between seven colonists (William Penn and others) and seven Native Americans. The Native Americans sit and stand to the left, and the colonists on the right present two scrolls that read "Ayer's Cherry Pectoral and Cures Colds, Coughs, &c." William Penn is holding a medicine bottle. The image is loosely based on Benjamin West's oil painting "The Treaty of Penn with the Indians." The back has an image of hands pouring medicine into a spoon in the upper left and text listing the curative properties of Ayer's Cherry Pectoral.
Conditions Cured (LC): Asthma, Catarrh, Cold (Disease), Cough, Croup, Influenza, Laryngitis, Throat—Diseases, Tuberculosis, Whooping Cough
Subjects (LC): Advertising—Medicine, Clothing And Dress, Ethnic Costume, Hats, Indians Of North America, Indigenous Peoples, Men, Treaties
ID: WH117
Collection: William H. Helfand Collection of Pharmaceutical Trade Cards

Title

Recipes and Remedies: Manuscript Cookbooks

Description

The Library holds about 40 manuscript receipt books in its collections. Many of the manuscripts contain a combination of culinary recipes, home remedies, and recipes for things like cosmetics and substances that would be used to accomplish general household tasks such as cleaning and polishing. Others are solely medical, containing formularies for the compounding of various remedies. This digital collection contains eleven English-language manuscript receipt books that were compiled between the seventeenth and the late nineteenth centuries in which the majority of the collected recipes are culinary in nature, but many recipes for home remedies are discoverable here as well.

Funding for the conservation and cataloging of the 31 culinary manuscripts was provided by the Pine Tree Foundation in 2012. Funding for the digitization of this group of English-language manuscripts was provided by the Pine Tree Foundation in 2019.

LIBRARY DIGITAL COLLECTIONS & EXHIBITS

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