If only Darwin had taken...

Bile Beans! It's off topic, but some capricious morning winds blew this old advert into my front garden, and it's just too good not to share. Darwin was not a well man for much of his adult life: while writing The Origin of Species he was sometimes so ill that he barely managed an hour of work a day. Diagnoses vary (Chagas, Menieres disease and lactose intolerance among them) but it seems that there is nothing Bile Beans could not cure, including Fulness After Meals, Water Brash, Offensive Breath, Influenza and its After Effects (are you reading World Health Organization?), Spasms, Pimples, Biliousness, Impure Blood, Skin Eruptions, Female Weaknesses, Prostration, Constipation - just some of the ailments fettled by Bile Beans. This panacea for just one shilling one pence ha'penny, although the Wise Invalid would buy the two shillings and ninepence tin, which contained three times the amount. The advert was printed in Otley, just along Wharfedale from Ilkley, Yorkshire, where a shattered Charles Darwin retreated in 1859 to escape the furore in London caused by The Origin of Species, and from where he posted the first copies of The Origin. Not having Bile Beans to put him right, Darwin took daily rides up a track to a bath house on the flanks of Rumbold's Moor where he took 'hydropathic' treatment: cold baths.