Detail of the center panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights triptych, by Hieronymous Bosch, c. 1500. © Prado, Madrid / Bridgeman Images.

Flesh

Volume IX, Number 4 | fall 2016

Miscellany

A fourteenth-century Egyptian encyclopedia includes a recipe to “tighten the vagina.” One should grind “the scorched skin of a jackal, the scorched hooves of a goat, the scorched hoof of a donkey, scorched thorn apple, a scorched sea crab, scorched polypody, and Persian thyme,” then administer as a suppository. “The woman,” promises the compiler, “becomes like a virgin.”

As the saying goes, an old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb.

—Chinua Achebe, 1958