Food and diet

When groups of people leave their home and move to other countries or even just regions within the same country they take with them their culinary habits. Familiar food is comforting and offers “a home far from home”. Movement of people also opens the door to new products. We would not have Italian food without the introduction of the tomato, originally from Southern and Central America in Western Europe by the Spanish in the sixteenth century.

The origins of evacuatory medicine lie with the humoural system. When a person’s humours became imbalanced this needed to be corrected by removing the ‘bad humours’ from their body. Sometimes this was done through bloodletting, but more often through ingesting emetics for vomiting, diuretics or laxatives.

Sweating and blistering the skin were also thought to help remove toxins from the body. ‘Heroic medicine’, popular in the 1700s and 1800s, was based on the idea that the more you evacuated, and the closer to death you came, the more successful the treatment must be.

Friends, neighbours, church ministers and philanthropic members of the landed gentry shared medical recipes and ingredients with people in their communities. Travelling salesmen sold mysterious secret remedies door to door. Medical traditions were passed down from mother to daughter through the generations.

First experiments on pancreas secretions

In 1753 James Lind published an account of a planned clinical experiment on the effects of citrus fruits on scurvy.  This experiment was to change the course of history.  In 1497 a Portuguese ship, commanded