[Sca-cooks] Butter

[Johnna Holloway]

One of the things to remember about Drummond is that the man
was a biochemist and quite a famous one at that. In the 1930s, Drummond 
was responsible for isolating pure vitamin A.^ 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Cecil_Drummond#cite_note-UCL02-9>
He took his knowledge of vitamins and then applied them to nutrition and 
then to the English diet.
That research became /The Englishman’s Food: A History of Five Centuries 
of English Diet /in 1939.
His co-author Anne Wilbraham became his second wife. Their affair broke 
up his first marriage. Jack and Anne
married and their child Elizabeth was born in 1942. During the war he 
served as scientific adviser to the Ministry of Food.
He was knighted for his efforts in 1944 and even received the United 
States medal of freedom
In 1952 the family was murdered while on vacation in France.
That means that the 1939 and 1940 editions of the book were published 
during Drummond's lifetime.
All other copies were published after his death. This also explains why 
the book was never revised in
the 1950's or updated in the 1960's.
/The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography /has quite a good biography 
on Drummond.

Johnnae/
/
Doc wrote:
> However there apparently was no reference in the
> original source to rickets.  The two ailments it
> specifically mentioned were ulcers and "wild fire"
> (which I take to mean a fever of some sort, though it
> could also be a rash).  So this isn't a matter of an
> medical treatment being arrived at empirically and
> then being explained.  The concept of using May Butter
> to stave off rickets was added by either Wilson or
> Drummond, with no evidence given that it was practiced
> in the middle ages at all. 
>
> - Doc