a couple of our patients have some pretty nasty skin complaints. DorothyDuck has boils on her face that defy description. it’s as if moses threw all his soot at once and the whole lot landed on Dorothy.
whatever her dipsomaniac doctor is prescribing, it’s having very little effect and nursemyra thinks its time to try something with a bit more guts. like a dried toad.
“toads should be thoroughly dried in the air or sun. they should be laid on the boil. then the toad will swell and drain the poison through the skin into its own body. once the toad is full it should be thrown away and a new toad applied to the boil.”
I’m all out of toads at the moment but I think I can cobble together the ingredients for this promising cure…
“roast the shells of newly laid eggs. ground the roasted shells into a powder. chop up the leaves and petals of marigold flowers. put the eggshells and marigolds into a pot of good ale. add treacle and warm over a fire”
it certainly sounds delicious and more achievable than “put a live hen nest to the swelling to draw out the pestilence” as live hen nests are thin on the ground at the Gimcrack. “to aid recovery after this, the patient must drink a glass of their own urine every day”.
now that won’t be a problem. we’ve got buckets of the stuff. they can bathe in it too if that will help though apparently “being put to bed and washed all over with a mixture of vinegar and rosewater” could have better results. I rather fancy that one myself so I think I’ll bring it to Bruno’s attention on monday.
I’m not sure what the cause of DorothyDuck’s outbreak is so I’ve been researching images of similar complaints. the closest I could find was this though she doesn’t actually have curly black hair at the base of her nose so try to picture her face without that detail.
……. and please let me know if you have access to dried toads. or live hen nests. I need a gross of each….
Looks like something of a Caesarian nature - I saw, I came, I chancred . . .
bet you’ve been waiting a long time to throw that line into the conversation
Actually, I get to use it at least three or four times a year . . . .to the excruciating discomfort of the surrounding populace and to my perverse sense of enjoyment
3 or 4 times a year? when’s its next outing? it’d be worth the price of a plane ticket to be part of that conversation
[...] now that I’ve found a live bird’s nest I can get to work on that Nobel prize winning cure for chancres. Published [...]
Don’t you think that the person holding the ‘nose’- rather firmly it seems - has nice nails; wonder where they get them done?
I have it on good authority they were polished at the Bastille
So that’s where Bryan Ferry got the inspiration for the lyric, “blood on a nail,” though I suspect he had to use ‘blood’ instead of ‘discharge’ . . . .
Eeww…. your mind is evil
eewww something smells funny here. I am gonna go see if I can locate a good source of toads and start building the hen house for my boils treatment, they are killing me.http://www.skin-boils.info/
Off to the hen house to drink my ale.
[...] today I came a little too close to a patient who appeared to be coughing but you know what those leaky old people are like. she changed her mind on a whim and disgorged what looked like spotted dick. the pudding of course. if you want to look at the other type of spotted dick you can go here. [...]
Gross indeed!