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Bodleian Library, MS Don. d. 3. Not previously published.
These letters were edited with the assistance of Carol Bolton, Tim Fulford and Ian Packer
For permission to publish the text of MSS in their possession, the editor wishes to thank the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; the Bodleian Library Oxford University; the British Library; Boston Public Library; the Syndics of Cambridge University Library; the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge; Haverford College, Connecticut; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Hornby Library, Liverpool Libraries and Information Services; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the John Rylands Library, Manchester; the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas; Luton Museum (Bedfordshire County Council); Massachusetts Historical Society; McGill University Library; the National Library of Scotland; the Newberry Library, Chicago; the New York Public Library (Pforzheimer Collections); the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; the Public Record Offices of Bedford, Suffolk (Bury St Edmunds) and Northumberland, the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne; the Trustees of the William Salt Library, Stafford, the Wisbech and Fenland Museum; the University of Virginia Library.
A research grant from the British Academy made much of the archival work possible, as did support from the English Department of Nottingham Trent University.
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P 55.at in Madeira, – climate, race & habits of life being the same. But a Port. Dr Pitta has lately published an English book about Madeira which you should look for.
P. 60 Stable boys grooms &c – pass a good deal of time in stables , where perhaps incipient colds may be cured by the climate.
P.61. So in this vale, – consumption has increased with the increased use of cotton among the women, in place of worsted, flannel & shifts.
P. 62 Sir Kenelm Digby was too eminent a man to be designated thus lightly.
I have found a passage for you in Izaak Waltons Life of Dr Donnemust relate
to the human milk prescription. “His old friend & physician Dr Fox, a man of great worth, came to him to
consult his health; who after a sight of him, & some queries concerning his distempers, told him that by Cordials, & drinking
milk twenty days together, there was a probability of his restoration to health; but he passionately denied to drink it. Nevertheless
Dr Fox,r Fox he had drunk it more to satisfy him, than to recover his health; & that he
would not drink it ten days longer upon the best moral assurance of having twenty years added to his life; for he loved it not, [ie his
life]r Zouch, who edited all Izaak Waltons Lives may have a note upon his passage, but certainly old Donne
would not have rebelled against the prescription had it been any other kind of milk than human.
I find also tho too late for your present use in Abraham Parsons’s Travels that at Aleppo ‘the air is reckoned
pernicious to people in consumptions; in which disorders those who can afford the expence usually go to some part of the sea coast,
mostly to Latachia which often recovers them.” – an exceedingly interesting. It may yet be of use to you to know that at Aleppo “the night air in summer is so dry, that a
sheet of the finest writing paper exposed to it all night, may be written on in the morning without the least sign of its having
imbibed any moisture.” P. 65.
Obs: on P. Cons. will be title enough, & better than if more were said.