By Today pubs and bars are filled to the brim with wondrous varieties of Gin. The spirit has been resurgent in recent years becoming the fashionable drink of discerning customers. Its varied flavours created through the use of different botanical blends broadens its appeal, but the crucial ingredient in this tempting
A Tom Cat’s Tail
James Woodforde was a rather ordinary man living in the eighteenth century. He was a Church of England clergyman working as a curate in Somerset before he was offered his own living in Norfolk in 1774.1 He has, however, been assured a place in history because he wrote a diary
Mary Hicks Witch of Huntingdon
On 28 July 1716 the Huntingdon assizes condemned Mary Hicks for witchcraft. According to the published narrative of her case, Mary lived in Huntingdon with her husband Edward and their 9-year-old daughter Elizabeth. Elizabeth was apparently the ‘Aple of his Eye’. This picture of domestic happiness shattered when Mary became
A Dubious Death
Over the past couple of weeks I have been reading through some of the correspondence of the Radcliffe Family, who lived in Hitchin in the eighteenth century. One case has been copied out of the notes of Sir Hans Sloane, a successful medical practitioner who treated Queen Anne and Kings George
Describing Disappointment
Patients voices can be rather rare in the printed literature produced in early modern England. Case notes are, obviously, from the perspective of the medical practitioner.We therefore get a sense of when things have failed to work, but without the patients own explanations of how they felt about these failures.