by Tessa Harris
John Friend: A physician to Queen Caroline, he bequeathed money for the foundation of an anatomy school at Oxford on his death.
Nathan Alcock: An Oxford physician who died in 1779.
A brace of shiners: A handful of coins.
The price of a corpse was measured in feet and inches.
Chapter 23
Hogarth: William Hogarth (1697–1764) was a famous satirist and artist.
paphians and doxies: Women of ill repute.
Chapter 25
hierophant: An interpreter of sacred mysteries.
Chapter 26
cinder sifters: These men made their living off the discarded rubbish of the capital.
costermongers: Street sellers of fruit and vegetables.
whisket: A basket.
unguent: Ointment, salves, or balm for soothing.
didicoy: A person who lives like a Gypsy but is not a true Romany.
“biting their thumbs at him”: a huge insult in the seventeenth century.
Chapter 28
Robert Hooke’s Micrographia: Published in 1665 and famous for its stunning illustrations of microscopic bodies.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: First published in 1665.
Chapter 31
feverfew: A herb believed to ease headaches.
Crown Inn: A five-hundred-year-old hostelry that still exists.
Amersham: One of the main towns along the London-to-Oxford coaching route in the Chiltern Hills.
Chapter 33
nosegay: A posy of medicinal plants and herbs used to disguise bad odors.
Chapter 34
Britain was still in the grip of “the Little Ice Age”—a series of particularly harsh winters in which the River Thames regularly froze over.
wherries: A wherry was a type of boat traditionally used for carrying cargo or passengers on rivers and canals in England, and is particularly associated with the River Thames.
sack-’em-up men: Grave robbers who sold corpses to anatomists.
Chapter 35
gallimaufry: A motley assortment of things.
gallipots: A gallipot was a small, glazed earthenware jar used by druggists for medicaments.
Chapter 36
Balliol: An Oxford college.
Gray’s Inn: A London Inn of Court.
Chapter 37
peascods: The pod of the pea.
nostrum mongers: Quacks who peddled false remedies for ailments.
furbelows: A gathered or pleated piece of material, especially as an ornament on a woman’s garment.
guglet: A bottle.
digitalis purpurea: Staffordshire doctor William Withering is credited with discovering the powers of the purple foxglove, digitalis purpurea. In 1775, one of his patients who was suffering from a heart complaint consulted a local Gypsy, took a secret herbal remedy, and promptly got much better. The active ingredient was digitalis purpurea and Withering subsequently wrote a paper on it.
Chapter 38
crossroads burial: In England until 1823, a suicide’s body was buried at a crossroads with a stake through the heart.
Chapter 42
Cherwell: A tributary of the Thames that runs through Oxford.
bargees: People employed on or in charge of a barge.
guineas: A guinea was worth one pound and one shilling.
Magdelene: An Oxford college on the Cherwell; pronounced “mord-lin.”
Chapter 44
tricorn: A three-cornered hat fashionable at the time.
Chapter 46
Bedford Lane: In Covent Garden, an area which by the 1760s had acquired such a dubious reputation that a magistrate dubbed it “the Great Square of Venus.”
St. George’s Hospital: Founded in 1733.
vinegar: Used as an antiseptic.
Chapter 50
mortsafe: An elaborate tomb to foil any attempts by grave robbers.
phaeton: A carriage drawn by a single horse or a pair, typically with four large wheels.
Chapter 51
lichen: A plant that grows on the shaded bases and trunks of mature trees, usually beech, in ancient woodland.
Chapter 53
Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus: A masterwork by the anatomist and obstetrician Dr. William Hunter, published in 1774.
Robert Hooke’s Micrographia contained detailed drawings of fungi.
KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2012 by Tessa Harris
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
ISBN: 978-0-7582-7802-9