Abstract

In an early scene of Sarah Grand’s novel The Beth Book, the child protagonist attempts to create a cure for rheumatism. Having read about the curative properties of snails in a “story of French life”, she corks up garden snails in a blacking bottle and places them in the oven to render into “snail oil”, envisaging rubbing patients with her product. This misguided attempt to create a cure explodes, and “boiling animal matter” bespatters the kitchen. This vignette indicates three previously overlooked topics that run through the novel. First is that Beth produces medical treatments and home remedies from a young age and continues to do so into adulthood. Second is the influence of the Family Herald magazine, which, I demonstrate, is fundamental in forming Beth’s early medical interests. Finally, it foreshadows numerous other instances in which animal bodies function as material in the pursuit of healing and care. The Beth Book is a text of New Woman fiction, significant for its political and moral agendas in relation to the women’s rights movement. In scholarship, this context tends to overshadow the medical culture, objects, and encounters which evidence day-to-day life in the novel. This article examines how ephemeral reading material and animals, both living and dead, function in acts of care and the pursuit of healing.