A research note--material of medical interest in the Cromartie papers.

The following note contains some lay reflections on the mass of medical material which may be found in collections of old family papers in Scotland. The Cromartie family papers, to which I have recently been given access, contain quite a lot of this sort of material. These papers were sorted into categories by William Fraser when he was working on the two-volume History of the Earls of Cromartie, published in 1876. He only published a fraction of the correspondence but left it all in remarkably good order. Only one category concerns us today, the rather random bundle bound together as Poetry, Medical Prescriptions and Cookery Recipes. The poetry I can judge-it is at best 'minor' and 'occasional' verse; the cookery section has not yet been looked at. 185