A medical recipe and commonplace book, featuring excerpts from Voltaire’s Letters Concerning the English Nation.
Detailed Summary:
Compilation of remedies for a range of complaints along with scattered culinary and household recipes and notes on dietetics and epidemiology. These are interspersed with digressions on trade and other subjects; excerpts from Voltaire’s Letters concerning the English Nation, Decker’s Essay on the Causes of the Decline of the Foreign Trade, Baron von Pöllnitz’s Mémoires, and Brookes’s General Practice of Physic; items copied from the English press; and miscellaneous economic and demographic statistics. The manuscript ends with a Liste des Pairs Catholiques Romains dans l’Angleterre followed by random partly personal notes: “The English Benedictine I knew at ye English convent in Paris, rue de S. Jacques, is nam’d Placid Naylor. The Prior’s name was Walmsby, a very learned Mathematician . . . My Schoolfellow Mr. Hubbock is Rector of ye Holy Trinity in Dorchester” [etc.].