institution’s extensive files and kindly granted permission for data to be taken
and published from some of the undergraduate theses they contain. Three
individual items of special importance came to our notice in the archives of
the Folklore Society in London, the Manx National Heritage Library in Dou-
glas and the National Botanic Gardens in Dublin. We would like to thank Dr
Larch Garrad and Miss Maura Scannell for their help in the last two connec-
tions, respectively, as well as in correspondence on Manx and Irish herbal
use more generally. We are also grateful to the three institutions for permis-
sion to cite records from the manuscripts in question.
Four authorities on different groups of cryptogamic plants were kind
enough to remedy our defective knowledge in those areas: Dr Francis Rose
and Professor Mark Seaward provided useful leads on the herbal uses of
lichens; Francis Rose and Professor Roy Watling identified the likeliest species
concerned in particular cases, and Roy Watling and Jenny Moore were pri-
marily instrumental in supplying the world distributions of the fungi and
seaweeds, respectively. And we thank Dr Barrie Juniper for guidance on the
taxonomy and distribution of apple species. D.E.A.’s colleagues in the then
Academic Unit of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine (now
the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College
London), in particular Professor Vivian Nutton and Dr Andrew Wear, were
similarly helpful in identifying some of the obscurer ailments.
Weboth owe a deep debt to the Wellcome Trust for grant support of this
workat different periods. Itsimperium in imperio,the Wellcome Institute for
the History of Medicine (as it was known until more recently), provided an
ideal base and academic environment for D.E.A. throughout the years that
the book has been in preparation, for which he is no less grateful. The Uni-
versity of East Anglia’s Centre for East Anglian Studies similarly provided not
only a base for G.H. for the duration of the research on the country remedies
of that region, one of the foundation stones of this book, but also a support-
iveenvironment for what would otherwise have been a solitary endeavour.
The library of the Folklore Society has proved of the greatest assistance to
D.E.A. during the years it has been housed in the D. M. S. Watson Library of
University College London, so conveniently close to the Wellcome Building.
Similarly, G.H. would like to pay tribute to the rich resources of the Norfolk
Record Office and (until its untimely destruction by fire in 1994) the Local
Studies Collection of Norwich Central Library.
For the illustrations we have the specialist skill of the photographers of
the Wellcome Trust’s Medical Photographic Library to thank, including Chris
Preface 13