Sir Kenelm Digby was distraught when his beloved wife, Venetia, died unexpectedly in 1633. Despite some rocky patches in their relationship, he had cared for her solicitously, every day ensuring that she drank a glass of the viper wine that he had prepared himself. The basic recipe for this well-known restorative was straightforward: immerse a few dozen poisonous snakes in a cask of wine, leave the mixture undisturbed for several months, then serve. Anxious to find a reason for Venetia’s unexpected demise, Kenelm arranged for the top of her skull to be removed, only to discover that her brain had turned to sludge. She had probably experienced a stroke several weeks earlier, so it was perhaps the regular doses of viper wine that had kept her going towards the end.

An American professor of English literature, Karen Bloom Gevirtz excels at unearthing unexpected stories about sickness and death, about love and rivalry, about compassion and greed. The Apothecary’s Wife delivers serious messages about the evils of consumerism, but it is also a good read that exposes some quirky corners of 16th-, 17th- and 18th-century Britain. An assiduous archival researcher, Gevirtz is a dab hand at spinning yarns with verve and humour. Delving into cookery books, newspapers and private diaries, she evokes an era in which vipers were relatively mundane ingredients, at least compared to other pharmaceutical standbys. Take, for example, the recommended cure for the convulsions of a pregnant woman: ‘Take one ear off dead Mans Skull yt was never buryed.’

Gevirtz writes with nostalgia about the good old days when both food and medicines were created in a domestic environment using local or homegrown ingredients. Women liberally exchanged medical recipes free of charge to help with the care of family, neighbours and servants. But that idyllic way of life was