The Cave of Wonders in Petersfield

Thanks, Cindy and Anna!

Sheep always important hereabouts

Amazing day today…I met Cindy and Anna at the lecture on Tuesday (they have been next door neighbours for 20 years); they kindly picked me up this morning , and took me on a jaunt about Hampshire…to a gorgeous old town (Aylresford pronounced Alsford), to the Hinton Ampner estate (http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/hinton-ampner/) (gorgeous!), then to what they called ‘the cave of wonders’ bookshop in Petersfield (http://www.petersfieldbookshop.com/). 

The fulling mill (wool processing)

 Found 3 food/cookery books and 4 textile books. I am excited. 

Petersfield Bookshop, aka 'Cave of Wonders'

I had a quick jaunt into the grocery store (it is 2 minutes from their houses), and they picked me up from the shop and  brought me back here to Chawton. So very very kind of them. I had an email from Anna this evening who had been looking on googlebooks and found a reference (1862) to support my research. What a special treat to have met them and to have spent a day with them.

I wrote a 'how's it going with the research?' update for Mary Sue Waisman and thought I'd share it here.

I wrote:

I believe I am starting to get to the point of having read enough about feeding the sick from 1640 to 1960 (when care shifted from home to hospitals) to begin to theorize about it. Still much more to sort out but I am on to something…. I am proposing that some (much?) of what we do now in terms of transitional diets stems from a time when we did not know about physiology and pathophysiology. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the large categories of disease were:

• consumptions (anything wasting – diabetes, cancers, bowel diseases, dysfunction of any organ, cardiac conditions) 
• fevers (anything that causes a fever, mostly infections), 
•  inflammations (something wrong; didn’t know what; did not waste away), 
•  palsies (strokes), and 
•  dropsies (edemas).

Then there were diarrheas, costiveness (constipation), and unexplained bleeding (nose, lung, urinary, rectal…none of these good news except maybe nosebleeds in children where that is still not unusual).

That seems to be what they knew or didn’t know about disease.

There were foods to give for each of these. That’s what I am coding now.

Concurrent to that was a vague belief system about the effect of foods on the humours and the balance thereof. Seemed to be an intuitive thing where people would say “Careful, that’s too strong” or “That is OK, it is light”…sounds familiar?? “Strong” meant that the humours would be unbalanced; light meant that the humours would remain balanced…I think this is what we are still living with the 'something light' without adequately defining it. 

I am thinking about is the use of the term 'nourishing' and what it meant before the 20th century.

And now something completely different....think "gallumphfing!"