Food Remedies: Facts About Foods And Their Medicinal Uses — Background and Themes

Fruit as a First Resort

The introductory section, titled “While there is Fruit there is Hope,” sets a polemical tone. Daniel argues that fruit should be the primary intervention for illness, not a supplement. She references the “grape cure” and “lemon cure” as known but underutilized practices, and insists that abandoning all food for fruit can achieve remarkable results. The structure here is rhetorical: she anticipates objections and counters them, moving from general principle to specific advice for acute illness. Notably, she does not provide case studies or clinical data; instead, she appeals to common sense and the authority of nature. The prose is direct and persuasive, aiming to convert the reader to a fruit-based approach before the catalog of individual foods begins.

Alphabetical Catalog of Remedies

The core of the book is an A-to-Z list of foods, each entry offering medicinal uses, preparation methods, and occasional warnings. For example, under “Onion,” Daniel describes a poultice for bronchitis that saved her own life at six weeks old, and notes that raw onions attract disease germs and should be burned after use in a sickroom. Under “Orange,” she prescribes a three- or four-day orange-only diet for influenza and mentions the “orange cure” for consumption. The entries vary in length and detail; some, like “Almond” or “Apple,” are brief, while others, like “Onion” and “Orange,” include multiple prescriptions. Daniel often cites Culpeper or Dr. Fernie, but also includes her own observations, such as the note that pears cause constipation if eaten without the skin. This blend of traditional lore and personal anecdote gives the catalog a hybrid character—part herbal, part memoir.

Movement Between Food and Disease

Daniel’s organization reflects a constant movement from specific foods to the conditions they treat, and back again. The catalog entries are structured around the food itself, but within each entry she shifts to diseases: onions for chilblains, earache, and bronchitis; oranges for influenza, malaria, and asthma; parsley for menstrual obstruction and kidney disease. This bidirectional structure is reinforced by the indices at the end, which list diseases and their corresponding remedies, as well as prescriptions and recipes. The effect is a practical reference system: a reader can start with a symptom and find the food, or start with a food and learn its uses. Daniel also includes warnings, such as the note that excessive raw parsley may cause epilepsy, demonstrating a cautious approach despite her enthusiasm for dietary cures.

Recurring Images of Purity and Danger

Throughout the text, certain images recur: fruit as hope, the sickroom purified by onions, the body cleansed by oranges. Daniel uses the language of attraction and repulsion—onions “draw corruption unto them” and must be burned; fruit “cleanses” the blood. This binary of pure and impure structures her argument: the natural food is pure, the diseased body is impure, and the remedy is a kind of purification. She also emphasizes the importance of distilled water and simple preparation, avoiding processed foods. The image of the onion poultice applied to a baby’s feet is particularly vivid, grounding her claims in a personal, almost folkloric memory. These recurring motifs give the book a consistent worldview, where health is restored by returning to elemental, unadulterated foods.

Readers approaching Food Remedies should treat it as a period document of early twentieth-century dietary reform, not a modern medical text. Daniel’s reliance on personal experience and herbal tradition means that some claims will strike contemporary readers as quaint or unsupported. Yet the book’s structure—moving from general principle to specific remedy, and back to a system of cross-references—offers a coherent method for exploring food as medicine. The indices are particularly useful for navigating the catalog, and the brevity of the work makes it easy to sample individual entries.

There’s something tender about Florence Daniel’s faith in an onion poultice or an orange cure—a belief that simple things might actually mend us. Reading her alongside Merck's 1899 Manual of the Materia Medica — A Closer Reading makes me feel the distance between those hopeful kitchens and the tidy clinical shelves, and I miss that old trust somehow.