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Talking Curious Cures with James Freeman
99 Plays2 years ago
In this episode, I spoke to the principal investigator of Curious Cures in Cambridge Libraries, Dr. James Freeman. Curious Cures is an impressive project to digitize, catalogue, and conserve over 180 medieval manuscripts that contain unedited medical recipes in the University of Cambridge Libraries.
Show notes, links, and transcript available on The Recipes Project.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Focus
00:00:08
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This is Around the Table, a new podcast from the Recipes Project.
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I'm your host, Sarah Kernan.
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Together, we will learn about exciting scholars, professionals, projects, resources, and collections focused on historical recipes.
Curious Cures Project Overview
00:00:26
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Today I'm speaking to Dr. James Freeman, Principal Investigator of Curious Cures in Cambridge Libraries, an impressive project to digitize, catalog and conserve over 180 medieval manuscripts that contain unedited medical recipes in the University of Cambridge Libraries.
00:00:45
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James, thank you so much for joining me today.
00:00:47
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My pleasure.
00:00:48
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Thank you very much for the invitation.
Scope and Manuscript Details
00:00:51
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Well, let's start off with some basics.
00:00:53
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Could you tell everyone about Curious Cures?
00:00:56
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What exactly does the project encompass and what manuscripts are part of this project?
00:01:02
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Well, you summarized it very well in your introduction.
00:01:05
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So as you say, there's over 180, I think it's 186 in total, medieval manuscripts, so handwritten books.
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They were
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are predominantly late medieval manuscripts, 14th, 15th century, some into the early 16th centuries, though there are a few earlier.
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I think the earliest is 11th century that we'll be covering.
00:01:27
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And the one thing that they have in common is that they contain unedited or uneditable even medical recipes.
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So these are recipes that have never been published in print before or for the most part, haven't been published in print.
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They're mostly
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English in origin, and particularly the later medieval ones, many of them contain recipes written in Middle English.
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But there's a big mix of Middle English, Latin, there's some in Anglo-Norman French, and there's some, a few, in Old English.
00:02:04
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But it's a fairly miscellaneous kind of corpus because, of course, the one thing it has in common is the unedited nature of the medical recipes that these books contain.
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So there are also manuscripts from Italy in particular, but also France.
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I think there's some from Germany too that are being covered by the project.
00:02:23
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But most of them are English.
00:02:25
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And that's a reflection also of the way in which the collections at Cambridge University Library and the colleges and Fitzwilliam Museum that are collaborating with us have developed and what our collection strengths are.
Conservation and Digitization Process
00:02:42
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what kind of conservation and cataloging and digitization is actually taking place with these?
00:02:49
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So the, um, uh, conservation is for the most part focused on the conservation for digitization.
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So this is the sort of routine stabilization work, repairing tears, uh, that sort of thing.
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And where items are particularly fragile, providing the photographers in,
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the University Libraries Digital Content Unit with sort of help in setting up, supporting and handling the manuscripts.
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There's a certain number within the project that will be able to do more intensive treatments, which might involve in some cases doing a bit of rebinding or kind of more time consuming work that will ensure that these materials are accessible
00:03:41
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not only digitally, but also in the flesh, so to speak, to researchers for decades to come.
00:03:50
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All of the manuscripts that are being covered will be re-boxed or boxed, the ones at the university library.
00:03:57
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And so that's the conservation sort of side of things.
00:04:02
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Digitization, so it's a bit of a mixed picture because we're collaborating with 12 Cambridge colleges, the Fitzwilliam Museum,
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and doing some of our own manuscripts at the university library as well.
00:04:14
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The picture is quite, is a bit mixed.
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So for instance, Trinity College, they've digitized all or almost all of the manuscripts that we'll be covering there and they have their own setup.
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Some of, but most of the colleges don't.
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Corpus is another one that has had all of its manuscripts already digitized, but most of them don't.
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So they will be coming to the UL for conservation treatment and for digitization.
00:04:40
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by my colleagues in the digital content unit.
Cataloging and Manuscript Selection
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That digitization is going to be cover to cover.
00:04:47
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So all of the bindings, spines, fore edges, end leaves, all of the pages.
00:04:53
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And I mean, I couldn't go into the technical specifications about photography, but if there are some photography enthusiasts among your listeners,
00:05:06
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They're welcome to get in touch, and I can put them in touch with Rafa Lozito, who is the project photographer, and she could give them all the details about the lenses and the photography cradle, the rig that they've got set up, because I know some people get really interested in this.
00:05:23
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So, yes, so that's the conservation and the digitization.
00:05:26
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The cataloging, again, it's kind of the usual sort of thing that you would expect with a digitization project.
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So I've got a team of three.
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cataloguers, Clark Dreeshan, Sarah Gilbert and Tuya Einonen, who will be describing the manuscript's textual contents, so what the texts are and the intellectual contents of the manuscripts, their material characteristics, so what they're made of, the collation, the structure of the
00:05:58
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of the gatherings of leaves, the dimensions, the layout of the text, what the decoration is, style of handwriting, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
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And also the history of those manuscripts as objects.
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So what they're, you know, the date and place of their origin to the degree that we're able to know this either from explicit evidence like scribal colophons, which are quite rare in English manuscripts, or more generally paleographical or art historical evidence.
00:06:29
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and also their provenance, their ownership, and then the point at which they've come to the UL.
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And there's a number of common ways in which they've been acquired or donated to us over the centuries.
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How have you determined, or how has your team determined, which manuscripts would actually be conserved and digitized in these collections, as well as what kind of transcription or contextualization work was actually necessary?
00:06:59
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It's a tricky one for conservation because, you know, we don't have the capacity outside of a project, outside of an externally funded project, to do the sorts of detailed condition survey work that is the step one, if you will, of the Curious Cures project.
00:07:19
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So we have to make a kind of guess and an informed estimate.
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of what is likely to be required on the basis of our experience with previous digitization projects.
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So we've just come to the end of a major project to digitize, catalog and conserve all of the manuscripts in Cambridge libraries that contain texts in Greek, which was funded by the Polonsky Foundation.
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So we've got a bit of experience there.
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So we can, my colleagues in conservation, Sean Thompson, who's leader, conservator and his colleagues,
00:07:55
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Marina Pellissari and Rachel Savicki can come up with a sort of per manuscript estimate of what materials they're likely to need, you know, materials to make a box, you know, wheat, starch, paste, Japanese tissue paper, that kind of thing for doing the repairs, but then can also make an estimate of what might be required for more intensive work, both materials and their time for a subset of maybe a dozen or a few more.
00:08:24
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that will require a bit more TLC, let's say.
00:08:29
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Though obviously they're much better informed than I am and they could, again, provide the kind of detail that me as a non-expert can't.
00:08:37
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So again, if there's any of your listeners who are interested in what they're doing, there will be blog posts.
00:08:42
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I can promise you that, but we could also give you further information if you're interested.
00:08:47
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Well, you've mentioned a couple other individuals who are part of the team who are helping out with this project.
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How large is the team?
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Is it all staff?
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Are there faculty or students or members of the public or who all is involved in this project?
Project Team and Public Engagement
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So it's a combination of existing members of staff whose time the project has essentially bought out.
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So
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Part of my time has been bought out while I run the project.
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So we've recruited somebody to backfill for my role.
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Although coincidentally, he is actually also working as a cataloger the rest of the time.
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So for instance, the cataloging team, they've all been hired from outside and they're on fixed term contracts for the project.
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But members of the conservation and digital content unit, for instance, they already worked at the UL.
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So the digital content unit, for instance, has to be sort of self-financing.
00:09:49
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So the wages of the photographers that work there are paid by digitization projects, commercial orders, that kind of thing.
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So it's a little bit of a mix.
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So, I mean, the team is pretty large.
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I think there's...
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At a rough guess, I think there's about a dozen or maybe 15 people involved in one way or another.
00:10:15
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I mean, it's larger if we also count all of the librarians in the college libraries who are liaising with my colleagues in conservation about the transfer of manuscripts from their library to ours and so on.
00:10:26
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So it's a fairly big enterprise, you could say.
00:10:32
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So we have regular team meetings and there's a steering group that meets quarterly just to kind of keep a handle on progress.
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There aren't members of the public involved at this stage in what we're doing simply because the focus of the project.
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So we're funded by Wellcome, by one of their research resources awards.
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And the focus or what Wellcome's kind of priority are in their formulation, health researchers in the humanities and social sciences.
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So, you know, historians of medicine, historians of science, that kind of thing.
00:11:10
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So this is a sort of scholarly endeavor aimed at providing those researchers with better access to the collections that we have at the UL and other libraries in Cambridge.
00:11:25
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That said, there's clearly great scope for public engagement and the response to the project so far to the initial publicity and the announcement of the launch has been kind of a bit mind blowing, to be honest.
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Like I knew people would be interested
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But I wasn't quite prepared for how interested and what level of attention the project has received so far.
00:11:48
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I mean, it's really encouraging.
00:11:50
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And a lot of that, that's testament to the kind of skill of my colleague, Stuart Roberts and his team in the library's communications office in getting the press release prepared and sent to the right places.
00:12:03
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So myself and other members of the team have been trying to keep the momentum going from that by doing
00:12:10
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podcast recordings like this, but also we've got blog posts that are forthcoming.
00:12:15
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And it's in the very, very early stages, but after the project, there is potentially the possibility that we might do a physical exhibition at the UL that can communicate some of the outputs of the project to a broader popular audience.
Release Plans and Manuscript Contents
00:12:38
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Well, given all the excitement about the project, how long do people have to wait to see any of these digitized manuscripts?
00:12:46
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Will we start seeing any soon or will we have to wait a couple of years for anything to be posted?
00:12:51
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No, no.
00:12:52
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For the sake of my sanity, we're going to release them in batches rather than leave it all to the end.
00:12:58
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So the first group of manuscripts, which I think might be sort of maybe around 20 or so,
00:13:05
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are going to hopefully, all being well, unless there's some major technical hiccup, will be appearing on the Cambridge Digital Library at the end of this month.
00:13:14
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It's tricky.
00:13:15
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Big digitisation projects, there's a lot of moving parts.
00:13:20
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And eventually, obviously, at the end, everything comes together.
00:13:23
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But at the moment, we have a bunch of manuscripts that the cataloguers have catalogued, a bunch of manuscripts that the photographers have photographed.
00:13:33
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But the two groups aren't necessarily the same
00:13:38
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So where those two groups do overlap, we'll be putting those online as soon as we can.
00:13:42
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And so the plan is to do the first release at the end of this month and then to do quarterly ones thereafter.
00:13:48
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So end of March, end of June, end of September and end of December.
00:13:55
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Digitizing these manuscripts obviously has great value for anyone studying medieval medicine, but what else is included in these manuscripts that other scholars might find useful?
00:14:07
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Are there culinary recipes or literature or poetry or interesting household or scientific texts?
00:14:17
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It's a real mix because the selection criteria, if you will, is that
00:14:23
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a manuscript contains an unedited medical recipe.
00:14:29
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We have got receptaria manuscripts, compilations of dozens or even hundreds of medical recipes.
00:14:36
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We've got medical manuscripts that contain recipes dotted in their texts or in their peripheries, but also non-medical manuscripts that have had recipes scribbled onto end leaves or fly leaves or margins or blank space or whatever.
00:14:53
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So it's a real mix.
00:14:55
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One thing I haven't said so far is that in addition to the cataloging, digitization and conservation, as if we've not got enough to do, I've also set us the challenge that we'll be transcribing all of the recipes in full.
00:15:09
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I can say a bit more about that in due course.
00:15:12
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So the idea is that what the cataloging will do is give researchers a sense
00:15:21
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or insights into the intellectual contexts in which medical recipe knowledge was being recorded and disseminated.
00:15:31
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And the digitization, kind of complementary to that, will show how that knowledge is being arranged and organized on the page.
00:15:42
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We know where the recipes are because of the great work that contributes us to the Index of Middle English Prose or the
00:15:50
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Thorndike and Khyber's index of in chip hits or Linda Voits and Patricia Kurtz's work on Middle English medical texts, which are now in the kind of ETK, EVK online resource, the fantastic work that they've done.
00:16:04
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We know where this stuff is, but we don't necessarily know what the, you know, the kind of granular detail, you know, where can we find recipes that concern toothache or headache or difficult pregnancies, or where do we find instances of,
00:16:19
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herbs like rosemary or sage or rue being used and in combination with what other sorts of ingredients.
00:16:26
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It's much harder to get at the nitty gritty.
00:16:29
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So the idea behind the transcriptions is that we can give researchers that sort of access.
00:16:36
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So yes, so the other contents can be very, very varied.
00:16:40
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There'll be the kinds of medical texts that you would expect to see, text by, I don't know, Matthias Platiaris,
00:16:49
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and others, or Johannes de Sancto Paolo, but also non-medical texts.
00:16:56
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So we have Bibles, books of hours, liturgical books.
00:17:02
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I think we have literary texts as well.
00:17:04
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So legal manuscripts.
00:17:07
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I have to say, when I was thinking about the project and putting things together and considering the scope for the project, I thought,
00:17:19
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you know, can we really justify all the energy and effort and expense that digitizing a non-medical manuscript that might just contain a few recipes on its end leaves when we could focus on more medical, more medically focused or, you know, medical specific manuscripts.
00:17:41
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Now, my rationale was that, well, manuscripts that contain more stable
00:17:48
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medical texts are, if they haven't already been edited, are more likely or have a greater chance than tiny little recipe texts, which are anonymous and very mutable and often have very small variations between them.
00:18:01
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The more stable medical texts have a much greater chance of being edited in a more traditional sort of scholarly edition, whether it's printed or online.
00:18:12
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And I was looking at some of the manuscripts as well, just thinking about the
00:18:16
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the non-medical contexts in which you find these recipes.
00:18:20
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And there's a legal manuscript at the UL that I was looking at that's part of the project.
00:18:26
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I think it's called, I think it's Additional Manuscript 2994.
00:18:30
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And it contains copies of statutes, legal formularies, that kind of thing.
00:18:37
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Interesting if you're into that kind of thing.
00:18:39
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And I looked at the recipes which are on the end leaves,
00:18:42
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And they are, you would expect they're going to be miscellaneous.
00:18:45
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They'll just, they've been scribbled in by a number of different hands.
00:18:48
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They don't have any kind of rationale.
00:18:50
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It was just, you know, convenience or there's the, the, the ease, most easily to hand bits of spare parchment.
00:19:01
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What I found here was that there's a couple of dozen or more recipes all for the same complaints that have been deliberately
00:19:12
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gathered by one person.
00:19:15
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They're all copied by the same hand or thereabouts.
00:19:19
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And most of them have been copied by one hand.
00:19:20
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There might be a couple of others that have been added on by different hands.
00:19:24
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So there's a sort of deliberate organizing intention behind this.
00:19:29
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I mean, they're all for gout.
00:19:30
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So insert obvious joke about medieval lawyers and their rich diets here.
00:19:35
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So yes, so the contents of the manuscripts is going to be very varied.
00:19:40
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Now that
00:19:41
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fulfills our own institutional objective, which is to get as many of our manuscripts digitized and cataloged and available to people virtually as possible.
00:19:53
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But it also fulfills, welcomes requirements and the needs of these historians of medicine, health researchers in the humanities and social sciences in being able to access this kind of stuff.
00:20:07
Speaker
Well,
00:20:08
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Going back to when you were coming up with the idea for this project, what was your intention?
00:20:15
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What makes now the right time to do such a large project like this?
00:20:21
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Well, we were, I mean, it's been long in gestation, I have to say.
00:20:25
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I think that our first kind of conversations about it, and I have to acknowledge the help of Peter Jones, who's a fellow at King's College here in Cambridge, and he was very helpful in these sort of early
00:20:38
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stages thinking about medical manuscripts at the UL.
00:20:41
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It was not a part of the collection, I have to confess.
00:20:44
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I knew very well at that time.
00:20:46
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But I think we were first talking about it in certainly pre-pandemic time, so I think maybe 2018.
00:20:53
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And we were at that stage just at the start of the Polonsky Greek Manuscripts Project.
00:21:00
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But of course, you know how it is.
00:21:01
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You're already thinking about what the next thing might be.
Inception and Educational Value of Project
00:21:05
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And we knew that Wellcome offered this
00:21:07
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research resources award to enable libraries like us to make our collections more accessible to researchers.
00:21:16
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And we also knew that, so we've got a kind of proven track record of cross-collection collaborative digitization projects.
00:21:25
Speaker
So we thought, well, how could we best leverage, if you will, what we're doing with the Polonsky project to the kind of next thing?
00:21:35
Speaker
One of our collection strengths as well as medical manuscripts are manuscripts containing texts in Middle English, you know, and literary texts, you know, Canterbury Tales, works by, you know, William Langland, John Gower and so on are very frequently used for undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, as well as being sort of internationally significant for research.
00:22:01
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The medical ones are as well, but I have to say,
00:22:04
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I hardly ever get those out for teaching.
00:22:06
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And I thought students would take, really take to this because of course, you know, well, they would, they would take to them for the reasons that they take to Chaucer because it's full of kind of bodily functions and, you know, very kind of visceral descriptions of, of human life and death.
00:22:24
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So I thought these will be, these will have a great role to play in student teaching in the future.
00:22:30
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So then I started to look at what kind of resources existed and think, well, how could we improve on all the brilliant work that the IME or ETK and EVK have done?
00:22:44
Speaker
And in September 2019, I went to a conference in Austria in Graz about TEI, so the Text Encoding Initiative.
Transcription and Licensing Details
00:22:56
Speaker
So this is about the kind of marking up of text with custom
00:23:00
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tags to essentially make it machine readable, categorizing what the content of the text is.
00:23:07
Speaker
And I met a researcher called Helmut Klug, who is working on the culinary recipes of the Middle Ages project, Karima, which I'm sure your listeners will be familiar with.
00:23:19
Speaker
And his team were transcribing and marking up these cooking recipes using TEI tags.
00:23:26
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So marking up what words described ingredients, preparatory techniques, measurements of weight or quantity or time, equipment, that kind of thing.
00:23:35
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And I thought, well, this would map brilliantly onto medical recipes.
00:23:43
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And I don't feel embarrassed about saying that.
00:23:46
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I thought, well, I'll just nick this methodology.
00:23:50
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It's brilliant.
00:23:51
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Why change it?
00:23:55
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in keeping some consistency with what Karima were doing, then of course you could bring the corpus of culinary and medical recipes together potentially, which would be really valuable for research.
00:24:08
Speaker
So to see what kind of crossover there is in these two texts.
00:24:13
Speaker
Now, first of all, you need the transcriptions.
00:24:16
Speaker
So we're not going to be able to do what Karima are doing at this stage.
00:24:21
Speaker
We may actually have to leave that to
00:24:24
Speaker
health researchers in the humanities and social sciences to do that more involved kind of compact marking up and then comparative analysis.
00:24:32
Speaker
But the development of handwritten text recognition technologies as well means that we stand a good chance of being able to generate the full text, the quantity of full text transcriptions that previous initiatives, cataloging and indexing projects
00:24:51
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haven't been able to do.
00:24:52
Speaker
So we'll be using Transcribus as a platform to do the line division and transcribe the text.
00:25:04
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We've got some developers here at the UL, Mary Chester Cadwell is one of them, and she is going to help us kind of get up and running with Transcribus and improve on the TI export that Transcribus generates.
00:25:20
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because it's a TEI description that the catalogers are producing.
00:25:25
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So we can bring that data together and put it onto the digital library.
00:25:29
Speaker
So yes, so all of those sorts of things came together in terms of the timing of the project.
00:25:37
Speaker
We'll have to see.
00:25:38
Speaker
There's going to be a bit of trial and error and testing with Transcribus now because of course, so I went to the latest conference at Innsbruck last September
00:25:50
Speaker
And it's clear that the machine, if you could call it that, requires much less manual training than it used to do, say, five, six, seven years ago, in order to produce a model that comes up with an acceptable or a workable character error rate.
00:26:07
Speaker
And some people who were presenting their research were getting, you know, really quite incredible results.
00:26:13
Speaker
You know, character error rates of, I mean, not just less than 10%, less than 5%.
00:26:17
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So, and I was assured by people who are more familiar with this than I am, which was basically everybody else at that conference, that it's much quicker to run things through transcribers and then correct than it is to do it manually.
00:26:35
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But we're not dealing with beautifully organized, neatly laid out texts with most medical recipe manuscripts.
00:26:46
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We're dealing with scruffy layouts, multiple hands, writing in different directions, texts on the margins and the peripheries.
00:27:02
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So we're going to have to just sort of see how things go.
00:27:07
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Some manuscripts undoubtedly will respond better to the transcriber's treatment than others.
00:27:13
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But I think it might be quite interesting and push the boundaries a little to see what the capabilities of this software is with this somewhat unstandard, unstandardized style of manuscript.
00:27:28
Speaker
The digitized images that come out of this project, those will obviously be able to be freely viewed by anyone.
00:27:36
Speaker
Will researchers be able to use those images freely?
00:27:40
Speaker
So we'll be making them available, as you say, on the digital library using the Creative Commons license CC by NC 4.0.
00:27:50
Speaker
So people can, they're free to share them and adapt them so long as attribution is given and that the purposes are non-commercial.
00:27:58
Speaker
In terms of publication, so you could use things on your blog or in teaching or in slideshows, go for it.
00:28:05
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But for publications, they would have to apply for licenses to reproduce.
00:28:11
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Now, there might be room for negotiation about terms on that.
00:28:14
Speaker
I'd have to leave that to my colleague, Dominiki Papadimitriou in the DCU.
00:28:19
Speaker
She could advise, but I hope that seems kind of reasonable.
00:28:25
Speaker
The images will be available
00:28:27
Speaker
in one form or another.
00:28:29
Speaker
I mean, I would say in perpetuity to the degree that any of us know what's going to happen in five or 10 or 20 years time.
00:28:37
Speaker
But certainly the descriptions will be uploaded as a data set and individually to the university library's repository, Apollo.
00:28:46
Speaker
So it will be possible to access them both there and through the digital library.
00:28:50
Speaker
So the idea is that there's a kind of stable version.
00:28:54
Speaker
Each catalog entry has its own DOI and
00:28:57
Speaker
the collection as a whole has a DOI so that there is a record of each of the catalogers work that they can point to in their future research and whatever.
00:29:09
Speaker
But also then we can, we may as the years go by want to enhance and augment and revise and expand
00:29:16
Speaker
those descriptions in the digital library.
00:29:19
Speaker
Yes.
Memorable Recipes and Manuscript Features
00:29:20
Speaker
Well, final question.
00:29:22
Speaker
Do you have any favorite recipes yet that you have come across in these manuscripts?
00:29:26
Speaker
Or are there any really outstanding features that you are excited for researchers to discover?
00:29:35
Speaker
Well, yeah, it's, that's, that's a, that's a hard question to answer, because there's so much good stuff in there.
00:29:43
Speaker
And if people, if people, you know, and your listeners, you know,
00:29:46
Speaker
work on this stuff, they'll know this already.
00:29:50
Speaker
I mean, I like one that's a cure for headache, which basically involves grinding pepper and boiling it in white wine.
00:29:59
Speaker
And then, as hot as thou might suffer, hold thereof in thy mouth.
00:30:05
Speaker
And when it is nigh cold, spit it out and take new, and so do till the ache be away.
00:30:10
Speaker
So basically, deal with your headache by getting drunk again.
00:30:13
Speaker
I mean, there are some really interesting
00:30:15
Speaker
recipes to deal with sort of female health and particularly childbirth.
00:30:23
Speaker
And it's interesting, you know, that the head to toe organization of recipes such as it is, struggles, I think, to know where to place these treatments.
00:30:34
Speaker
You know, it does start off with the head and, you know, works through headaches and toothaches and sore eyes and, you know, coughs and, you know, aching arms.
00:30:43
Speaker
And then it sort of gets to the,
00:30:44
Speaker
middle regions and then sort of loses its way.
00:30:47
Speaker
But there are charms in amongst these medical recipes, of course.
00:30:53
Speaker
So there's one in additional manuscript 9308, which is at the UL, very common.
00:31:00
Speaker
It's one of the so-called pepperit charms, and it's for a woman that travaileth of child.
00:31:07
Speaker
And pepperit being the Latin verb give birth to or bear as child, it invokes a
00:31:13
Speaker
all of these female saints who, you know, um, gave birth.
00:31:18
Speaker
So, uh, invokes, um, you know, you know, St.
00:31:21
Speaker
Mary, Pepperit Christ, um, Sancta Anna, Pepperit Mariam, Sancta Elizabeth, Pepperit Johannem, Sancta Cecilia, Pepperit Remigium.
00:31:30
Speaker
So it's invoking all of these, uh, all of these, um, important female saints.
00:31:36
Speaker
And you're supposed to, um,
00:31:38
Speaker
write this on a strip of parchment and bind it around the arm or the leg or the belly of the woman who's having a bad labor.
00:31:48
Speaker
And in fact, I think the welcome have a surviving example of this.
00:31:54
Speaker
So that's the kind of charm side of it.
00:31:56
Speaker
But then you also see the medical side of it as well.
00:32:00
Speaker
And there's a recipe for a woman in a similar predicament
00:32:04
Speaker
and it instructs you to take the juice of vervain, so the kind of common plant verbena, and give this to her to drink in cold water, and she'll soon be delivered with the grace of Jesus.
00:32:15
Speaker
So, I mean, I wouldn't dare to presume how effective or not that might be.
00:32:20
Speaker
I suspect not very effective at all.
00:32:23
Speaker
But I don't know what the juice of vervain tastes like.
00:32:25
Speaker
Maybe it's utterly disgusting, and the idea is that it takes your mind off things.
00:32:30
Speaker
But yes, there's so many to choose from.
00:32:34
Speaker
I mean, if anybody here listens to the podcast, this podcast will kill you.
00:32:40
Speaker
They had one on gout recently, and the ones for gout are absolutely brilliant.
00:32:46
Speaker
There's a very elaborate recipe which I couldn't resist mentioning in the publicity for the project about roasting a puppy stuffed with snails and sage, or the one that involves taking an owl
00:33:01
Speaker
gutting it, salting it, baking it in an earthenware pot, and then grinding it up and mixing it with boar's grease to make a salve that you then rub on the affected area.
00:33:10
Speaker
None of which will have worked.
00:33:12
Speaker
But yeah, the elaborateness of some of these recipes.
00:33:17
Speaker
There's a researcher here in Cambridge, Hannah Bauer, who works on recipes and magic tricks as well.
00:33:24
Speaker
And she's sort of suggested, you know, what's the kind of value of these?
00:33:27
Speaker
Is there a kind of entertainment
00:33:29
Speaker
Dimension to them is with some of them not actually intended to be taken seriously, which I think is really interesting.
00:33:36
Speaker
So hopefully what the project is doing will provide her and and other researchers in this area with the material for for new for new discoveries and new insights.
Closing Remarks and Subscription Encouragement
00:33:47
Speaker
Yeah, I've no doubt that this project is going to yield a lot of incredible research with all the information that researchers will now have access to freely.
00:33:58
Speaker
So, James, thank you again so much for joining me today to talk about Curious Cures.
00:34:04
Speaker
My pleasure.
00:34:05
Speaker
Thanks very much for the invitation, Sarah.
00:34:08
Speaker
Thanks to everyone for listening today.
00:34:10
Speaker
Please remember to subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode.
00:34:15
Speaker
I'll see you again next time on Around the Table.