David Alfred Bywaters's Crossword Cavalcade & Fortnightly Victorian Novel Recommender. Every Saturday! Either a new language-torturing puzzle or an old novel by an unjustly neglected Victorian author. Why waste time on other amusements?

Crossword 301: Alternative Medicine

Emma Brownlow, The Sick Room
Emma Brownlow, The Sick Room

On March 26, 1665, Samuel Pepys, the great English diarist, recorded that he had lately enjoyed an unusually long spell of good health and wondered what had caused it.  Three possibilities occurred to him:  the possession of a rabbit’s foot (an excellent “preservative against wind”), the avoidance of sleeping on his back (which tended to make his “water the next morning . . . very hot”), or the “taking of a pill of turpentine every morning.”  Now, as a confirmed disbeliever in conventional medicine, as in all things based on reason and logic, I’ve tried each of these remedies myself, without however noticing much good effect, though the last of them may have had something to do with the state of mind in which I thought up today’s puzzle.


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301 Alternative Medicine