Items

Title: Anatomical Woman

Title: Burdock Blood Bitters
Description: Trade card advertising Burdock Blood Bitters featuring a portrait of a woman in elegant dress with a red, feathered hat that is adorned with a large B pin of sorts on which is written Burdock Blood Bitters. She is wearing gold jewelry, including a choker with a B on it. Her dress is blue with lilies on it, and she has a small rose pinned to the front of her dress. The back has testimony from satisfied users.
Conditions Cured (LC): Asthma, Catarrh, Cold (Disease), Croup, Hemorrhoids, Rheumatism
Subjects (LC): Advertising—Medicine, Clothing And Dress, Feathers, Flowers, Gold Jewelry, Portraits, Women's Hats
ID: WH241
Collection: William H. Helfand Collection of Pharmaceutical Trade Cards

Title

Description

This manuscript contains 500 Greek and Roman recipes from the fourth and fifth century, both culinary and medical, reflecting the polyglot culture of the Mediterranean basin. Sometimes referred to as the oldest extant cookbook in the West, the manuscript is divided into ten books. It is likely that the Apicius began as a Greek collection, mainly written in Latin, and adapted for a Roman palate. The collection is likely compiled from many sources, as no evidence exists that Apicius (a Roman gourmet in 1st century AD), authored a book of cookery. Our manuscript was penned in several hands in a mix of Anglo-Saxon and Carolingian scripts at the monastery at Fulda (Germany) around 830 AD. It is one of two manuscripts (the other at the Vatican) presumed to have been copied from a now lost common source. The Apicius manuscript is the gem of the Academy’s Margaret Barclay Wilson Collection of cookery, acquired in 1929.

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Subjects (LC)

Cookbooks, Cooking, Latin peoples, Cooking, Mediterranean, Cooking, Roman, Early works to 1800, Manuscripts, Medicine

Title: Chocolat de l'Abbaye d'Igny
Description: Trade card printed on two sides advertising chocolate manufactured in France.
Subjects (LC): Surgery
Manufacturer: Chocolat de l'Abbaye d'Igny
Language: French
ID: WH219
Collection: William H. Helfand Collection of Pharmaceutical Trade Cards

Title: Gessner's Owl
Description: Tucked among the magical storehouses of Diagon Alley is a shop that is always dark in order to accommodate the preferences of its nocturnal inhabitants. This is Eeylops Owl Emporium—and the setting for Harry Potter's adoption of his pet, Hedwig, who remains one of his truest companions throughout his school years. The Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner depicted many owls in his volume dedicated to birds, including this handsome grey owl with his abundance of downy feathers and keenly intelligent eyes. Owls of all types appear throughout the series, retaining the cultural associations they've had for centuries of both wisdom and omens.
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 woman pulling a red-headed boy over a wooden fence by the back neck of his shirt. His hat is falling off, and he is barefooted. She is blond and is wearing a small, brown hat. There are fruit trees on the woman's side of the fence. The back is a blank template for a postcard.
Conditions Cured (LC): Cold (Disease), Cough
Subjects (LC): Advertising—Medicine, Clothing And Dress, Fruit Trees, Hats, Nature, Trees, Wooden Fences
ID: WH330
Collection: William H. Helfand Collection of Pharmaceutical Trade Cards

Title: Lawrence and Martin's Tolu
Manufacturer: [Lawrence and Martin], [s.l.]
Language: English
ID: WH293
Collection: William H. Helfand Collection of Pharmaceutical Trade Cards

Title: Everybody says the Botanical Preparations are the Best
Description: Trade card printed on two sides advertising herbal remedies produced by the Excelsior Botanical Company.
Subjects (LC): Children playing
Manufacturer: Excelsior Botanical Co. (Boonville (N.Y.))
Language: English
ID: WH263
Collection: William H. Helfand Collection of Pharmaceutical Trade Cards

Title: Aldrovandi's Basilisk
Description: All hail the king of the snakes! Basilisks—from the Greek basiliskos, for "little king," are depicted in many early modern natural histories and were said to be the kings of the serpents (Dark Arts students will recognize them for their diadem-shaped crests). J.K. Rowling preserves many details of the accounts from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources about this terrifying snake, including his birth from a chicken's egg hatched under a toad, and a gaze that could kill. Susceptible to wizard control by some Parselmouths, only Tom Riddle proved snake-charmer enough to ever challenge one.
Collection: How to Pass Your O.W.L.s at Hogwarts: A Prep Course

Title: A Simple Catechism [from verso]
Description: Trade card printed on two sides advertising Slaven's Effervescent Fruit Salt, a remedy for digestive ailments.
Subjects (LC): Dolls, Monocles, Top hats
Language: English
ID: WH353
Collection: William H. Helfand Collection of Pharmaceutical Trade Cards

Title: H.R. Steven's Family Balsam
Description: Trade card printed on two sides advertising Familine, a cure-all remedy.
Subjects (LC): Roses
Manufacturer: H.R. Stevens (Boston (Mass.))
Language: English
ID: WH265
Collection: William H. Helfand Collection of Pharmaceutical Trade Cards

Title: Milk: Its Value to the Home, Its Care in the Home
Description: An eight-page pamphlet (a single sheet folded into eight pages) produced by the New York Milk Committee, emphasizing milk's importance as a "family food." Images of healthy children, cows in verdant fields, and milk surrounded by produce reinforce the central message of milk's vital role in maintaining and promoting children's health. Nutritional comparisons between milk and other foods are provided, as are instructions for the proper selection, storage, and use of milk. Members of the Milk Committee's Standing Committee on Milk Consumers are listed at the top of the last page.
Subjects (LC): Milk, Infants, Nutrition, Education, Child rearing
ID: mk1e043
Geographic Subject: New York. New York City.
Collection: New York Milk Committee Ephemera Collection

Title: We Always Keep in Our Drug Store a Supply of Boschee's German Syrup & Green's August Flower [from verso]
Description: Trade card advertising Boschee's German Syrup and Green's August Flower featuring a space in which there is some writing. This space is surrounded by various blue, red, and pink flowers. The back lists the ailments the Syrup and the Flower can cure.
Conditions Cured (LC): Asthma, Bronchitis, Cold (Disease), Constipation, Cough, Croup, Headache, Heartburn, Indigestion, Palpitation, Tuberculosis
Subjects (LC): Advertising—Medicine, Bouquets, Flowers
ID: WH231
Collection: William H. Helfand Collection of Pharmaceutical Trade Cards

Title: Dr. Grosvenor's Liveraid, Cures All Diseases of the Stomach Liver & Blood
Description: Trade card advertising Dr. Grosvenor's Liveraid and Bellanodyne featuring a sign that reads: "Dr. Grosvenor's Liveraid, cures all diseases of the stomach, liver, & blood. Small doses, prompt effect." The sign has a bouquet of flowers inserted in it. In the foreground is a body of water with two frogs and three ducks. The back is obscured, but lists the ailments the Liveraid cures and mentions a pain-relieving plaster called Bellanodyne.
Conditions Cured (LC): Biliary Tract-Diseases, Constipation, Headache, Indigestion, Malaria, Rheumatism
Subjects (LC): Acquatic Animals, Advertising—Medicine, Amphibians, Animals, Ducks, Flowers, Frogs, Grasslands, Nature, Trees, Water, Water Lilies
ID: WH270
Collection: William H. Helfand Collection of Pharmaceutical Trade Cards

Title: Duncumb recipe book : autograph manuscript signed, 1791-1800s
Description: This manuscript consists of approximately 425 culinary recipes and 50 medical and household receipts, many attributed. About two-thirds of the recipes in the culinary section are savory and one-third sweet, many of the former stews and pickled dishes, most of the latter creams and jellies. The medicinal receipts include treatments for worms, coughs, bruises, pain, burns, and other ailments.
Subjects (LC): Medicine -- Formulae, receipts, prescriptions, Traditional medicine -- Formulae, receipts, prescriptions, Cooking, English, Manuscripts, English -- 18th century, Manuscripts, English -- 19th century

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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