A Cordiall Water

“This book is a collection of odd and old receipes to cure the ills of people and animals, mostly told to me by the believers....

“Myself, I do not know enough to say how or why one certain weed will calm a fever in a sick dog or antelope, nor can I guess what tells the beasts about that weed... All I can do is wonder, and everything that I have remembered and recorded here has made me do that.”

For years Mary Fisher has been collecting lore about odd restoratives and remedies—medicines, nostrums, herbs, oils, powders, charms, poultices, liquors, brews and miscellaneous cure-alls for coughs, colds, sore throats, poisons, “consumpshuns,” freckles and warts, nosebleeds, bites of insects and mad dogs, burns, rashes, rheumatism, excess weight, chills, fevers, indigestion, hangovers, impotence, “lowness of Spirrits,” and wounds incurred in the mating season.

Now she tells us about the origins, applications and apparent effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of these unusual “receipts” in a group of essays in which wonder and wisdom, nostalgia and quiet humor are the main ingredients. Mrs. Fisher early developed a skepticism about much of what we call the art of medicine and a suspicion of such things as “miracle drugs” and our bland acceptance of them. Out of this grew a consciousness of “the basic simplicity of caring for the human body.”

Her lore comes from myriad places and people—an Italian raised in the Brazilian jungle, Provence, where the people find some quality of cure in almost every flower and leaf, a Spanish barman, a journal kept by a London apothecary in Shakespeare’s time, Mexico and various parts of the United States from New England to California, a beautiful French actress, a runaway from a Kansas farm, and Mrs. Fisher’s own great-grandmother.

“There is no doubt,” M. F. K. Fisher writes, “that much of what we know of medicine comes from very ancient times, and from the birds and animals that we have watched.”