Making the Cure. A Look at Irish Folk Medicine. Dublin: Talbot Press, 1972. First Edition. Pp xiii, 178. Green cloth boards in pictorial dust jacket. Jacket price-clipped, section cut from front free endpaper, scattered spotting to text; otherwise a very good copy.

Illustrated with two plates of coloured drawings by Philip V. Moon (originally commissioned by the Wellcome Foundation for the use in medical advertising brochures).

Scarce work delving into traditional Irish remedies and practices. Many of the cures mentioned in the book were pure magic or more frequently a mixture of magic, pagan or Christian beliefs.

It explores a range of folk cures, some of which were practical and based on natural observations, while others were quite unusual and even dangerous. For example, treatments included using sheep droppings boiled in milk for whooping cough and tying a child with dropsy in a rope used by a hangman.