How to Cure Your Cough, 1558

BnF, MS Lat. 9471 (15th c.)

A most beautiful and pleasant secret for curing a cough by greasing the soles of the feet. An extremely true thing, and very easy. 

Take two or three heads of garlic and peel them, and crush them very well, and then add pork fat, and crush it together well again. Then, in the evening when you want to go to bed, take your socks off and put the soles of your feet toward the fire, and grease the soles with the mixture of garlic and fat. And keeping the feet always to the fire so that it almost burns you, or as hot as you can endure, let the ointment stay on for a while. Then put on warm socks and go to bed, and in bed have your back massaged a little with the ointment. And after three evenings you will be miraculously cured from any cough.

De’ segreti del reverendo donno Alessio Piemontese

It's cold season and all you really want is a miraculous cure for your cough, succulent feet, and the odor of roasted garlic and bacon wherever you go. Is that too much to ask?

How to Slim Down in Fourteen Days, 1595

Charles Mellin, Portrait of a
Gentleman (c. 1645)

"An excellent and approved thing to make them slender, that are grosse. Let them eate three or foure cloves of Garlick, with as much of Bread and butter every morning and evening, first and last, neither eating nor drinking of three or foure howres after their taking of it in the morning for the space of fourteene days at the least: and drinke every day three draughts of the decoction of Fennell: that is, of the water wherein Fennell is sod, and well strained, fourteene dayes after the least, at morning, noone and night. I knewe a man that was marveilous grosse, & could not go a quarter of a mile, but was enforst to rest him a dosen times at the least: that with this medicine tooke away his grossenesse, and after could iourney verye well on foote."

Thomas Lupton, A Thousand Notable Things (1595)

The Garlic Bread Cleanse, fad diet of the late sixteenth century, is pure genius. After fourteen days of this regimen you'll be rid of that pesky grossenesse and ready to hit the beach. On foote.