Book Notes

Cliff and Linda Hoyt. A Century of Cures: Dr. J. C. Ayers & Co., Lowell, Mass, U.S.A. Lowell, Mass.: Lowell Historical Society, 2018. xx + 486 pp. Ill. No price given. (978-0-9631604-4-7).

Authors Cliff and Linda Hoyt note in their preface that they have spent thirty years collecting advertising materials and other products from the J. C. Ayers & Co. (p. xviii). They have written this reference guide to address their own questions about the pharmaceutical chemist and developer of medicines as well as to create a "wide-ranging resource for collectors and students of nineteenth-century medicines and advertising" (p. xix). A Century of Cures includes more than seven hundred images of trade cards, posters, pamphlets, packaging, magazine advertisements, as well as company documents and photographs.

Dinty W. Moore, Erin Murphy, and Renée K. Nicholson, eds. Bodies of Truth: Personal Narratives on Illness, Disability, and Medicine. Foreword by Jacek L. Mostwin. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. xx + 188 pp. $19.95 (978-1-4962-0360-1).

Bodies of Truth is a "compendium of personal accounts of individuals caught up in the lived experience of illness, assembled by the editors for the public and the health care professions, designed to speak to the practitioner, the educator, and the general reader" (p. xi). This collection of twenty-five stories reveals the experiences of "patients, nurses, doctors, parents, children, caregivers, and others" as they navigate "cancer, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, severe food allergies" (p. xvi), among other illnesses.

Howard Phillips, ed. In a Time of Plague: Memories of the "Spanish" Flu Epidemic of 1918 in South Africa. Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 2018. xxviii + 196 pp. Ill. No price given (978-0-9947207-1-9).

In September and October of 1918, more than three hundred thousand people died of the Spanish influenza outbreak in South Africa (p. x). In a Time of Plague presents interviews with and letters from influenza survivors and witnesses. The transcriptions are "arranged geographically and . . . almost chronologically" (p. xxvi). The editor notes, "Such very personal memories by individuals like them help underscore that 'Black October' was far more than just a demographic disaster which can be measured statistically" (p. xxiii).