Transcriber’s notes:

In this transcription, hyperlinks are indicated by a black dotted underline (plus a coloured highlight when the mouse pointer hovers over them). A red dashed underline indicates the presence of a transcriber’s comment; scrolling the mouse pointer over such text will reveal the comment. Footnote markers in the text are hyperlinked to the footnotes which have been relocated to the end of the book and assigned a page number in the table of contents to help locate them. Page numbers are displayed in the right margin. Because of the very small amount of text on some pages, the page numbers occasionally become superimposed if viewed on a wide screen.

No attempt has been made to standardise the numerous inconsistencies throughout the text with respect to punctuation, [e.g. (No. 490,)/(No. 490.)/(No. 490)/(No. 490).], spelling, case and hyphenation [e.g. P. 36/p. 88, DR. MOFFETT/Dr. MUFFETT, Colton/Coulton, toothach/toothache, Head-Ach/Head-ach/Head-ache, nightmare/Night-Mare/night-mare, mouthsful/mouthfuls, scum/skum, table-spoonful/tablespooonful, Curacoa/Curaçoa, and others]. These and various archaic spellings all remain as in the original. The transcription also replicates the original text in its use of upper case, lower case, small capitals, and italics.

On the other hand, several errors, omissions and uncertainties have been corrected after reference to the subsequent edition (3rd) of the book for clarification: for example, missing characters resulting from incomplete scan images; missing quotation marks; a missing value for ‘Port’ in the table on page 138; and a three-paragraph apparent ‘blockquote’ on page 141 (actually a partial footnote that had become separated from its preceding paragraphs on page 139), has been reunited with the rest of the footnote. A few incorrect page references have been rectified.

The incorrect sequencing of the index replicates that in the original publication. In that era the letters i and j were interchangeable, and words beginning with these letters are grouped together in the index. The words and abbreviations Ditto, ditto, Do., do., are used inconsistently in the index.

Numbered items (sometimes asterisked) of the style (No. 463*) are references to the 3rd edition of “The Cook’s Oracle” as explained on the page that follows the table of contents.

The text contains archaic symbols previously used by apothecaries, namely, ℞ (meaning ‘Prescription take’) on pages 232 and 285 and ℈ (meaning ‘scruple’ – a measure of weight) in Footnote 104. The symbols display correctly with Firefox, Chrome and Safari browsers, but Internet Explorer sometimes fails to display them correctly unless its default font is changed to Lucida Sans Unicode.