UNRECORDED MEDICAL IMPRINT WITH RECIPES Margaret Makewell’s Best Friends; or Eighty Most Excellent Prescriptions and Recipes

Bound upside down in the publisher’s decorative, ribbed cloth over boards with a printed paper label to the upper cover. Faded and scuffed but sound; sewing loose but holding. The book collates: vi, pp42. A little browning to pages but otherwise the text is unmarked. Opposite the final printed page an early owner has written their own recipe ‘For the Stopage Warts...’ Unlocated in JISC, OCLC.

A Preface preceding the text assures readers that it ‘contains only safe and simple remedies... A most successful trial of which, for nearly thirty years, induces M.W. to render them more widely useful’ followed by a reminder to pay all physicians as ‘The Parish Doctor, often disgracefully negligent, is almost always shamefully ill paid.’ The text consists of remedies for a sequence of ailments that include Burns, Cough Pills, Croup, Convulsions, Scurvy, Tooth-Ache and Worms followed by recipes for balms such as Arrow Root Jelly, Laudanum and Purging Pills. The author’s name is assumed to be a pseudonym - we cannot locate any other surviving copy of the book.