This is an intriguing volume. At its core lies an attempt to bring together two oral history projects, one from the 1920s and the other in the later twentieth century, both concerned with the nature, content and memory of what we might call ‘popular medical remedies’ in East Anglia. The earlier study was conducted by Dr Mark Taylor, medical officer of Norwich from 1920 to 1927, who collected and recorded details of popular medical remedies circulating amongst, or part of the recent memory of, people in Norfolk. The later study, by the author of this volume Gabrielle Hatfield, looked back on the twentieth century from a 1990 standpoint, collecting oral histories for the preceding seventy years or so.

While many of the remedies mentioned in the book will be familiar to medical historians with interests in the nature of medical knowledge and the professionalisation of medicine, for most readers this book will offer something both new and interesting. Judged simply by its entertainment value, Hatfield has produced a very good book. The remedies outlined range from the superstitious, such as wearing a necklace of Horse Chestnuts to prevent rheumatism, the use of cow dung to cure ulcers or cobwebs to staunch blood flow in open wounds, through the familiar, such as chewing or brewing the bark of the willow tree as a way of curing a headache or fever, and the highly current, such as the various recipes for bruises and broken bones that have the herb comfrey at their core, to the ‘I must try this’, such as rubbing elder leaves into spots of eczema. There is, however, more to this book, and three further points are worth making.

The first is that a surprising number of the remedies collected by Taylor in the 1920s, and thus very much rooted in the nineteenth century, were still known and practised by people in the twentieth century, some even into the 1990s. The ‘triumph’ of biomedicine must thus be treated with caution. A second observation is that while I laughed aloud at some of the more obscure and superstitious of the cures, many seem to have a surprising biomedical currency. The author refers to the frequency with which goose grass appears in the remedies, and recounts current attempts to exploit its definitive medicinal properties. To this we might add recent interest by drug companies in other common ingredients in these remedies, including, for instance, hawthorn, comfrey, chickweed and the bark of cherry and plum trees, the latter seen as a potential cure for acne. The final point is that the book is firmly situated in the demographic and medical history literature. It thus contributes something quite important to a growing historiography of self-dosing, lay-medicines and commonplace books, extending by some one hundred years the time frame for a meaningful analysis of these issues. The volume is slim, but it is well worth reading.