Universal Formulary Art Asset Pack
Free medical equipment art for use in your games
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A Universal Formulary
When
mentioned “beef tea” in Discord the other day, that sent me down a rabbit hole. Searching for it led to Beef tea, a very 19th century remedy at the Royal College of Physicians blog:For those of you curious as to how this beef tea was made, two recipes appear in A universal formulary: containing the methods of preparing and administering officinal and other medicines. Ellis’ recipe required that one pound of lean beef be shredded and boiled with one quart of water for 20 minutes, with any scum that formed on the surface being removed.
As someone who loves old recipe books, I had to learn more about this Universal Formulary book!
There are two public domain versions of the document online: an 1851 version published in London, and an 1859 version "carefully revised and much extended" published in Philadelphia. The 1859 version hosted by NIH has searchable text.
Boiled flour and chicken water
The Universal Formulary is a collection of pharmaceutical reference information, drug compounding instructions, and guidelines for prescribing medicines. It also includes some wonderfully named recipes and remedies such as boiled flour, beef tea, calves’ feet jelly, and chicken water:
Suggesting beef or chicken broth (which is what these essentially are) for those who are ill is nothing new, and still recommended today. What I enjoy is the language used to describe the recipes. I think it is both a window into the time period, and beautiful in its own linguistic way.
Illustrations and diagrams for your games
While the 1851 Universal Formulary doesn’t seem to include any illustrations, the revised 1859 version has quite a few! There are about thirty figures and diagrams of medical equipment such as urinometers, distillation devices, pipettes, and pill machines.
And thus was born the Universal Formulary Art Asset collection!
The images in this collection were extracted from the 1859 version PDF hosted by the NIH National Library of Medicine. They were level adjusted, backgrounds were removed, and exported as transparent PNG files.
License and usage
The original images are in the public domain.
Like Rabbits & Demons, this art asset pack is published under a CC-BY-4.0 license. You are free to use these images in your personal and commercial projects. You can remix, edit, alter, recolor, and otherwise modify them. Please credit Exeunt Press.
While not required, I'd love to hear about how you found a use for them, so please share!
Chicken Water Jam?
I’m fascinated by old books with recipes and remedies, and the Universal Formulary is no exception. I find them to be great sources of inspiration for writing TTRPG supplements. That’s exactly what I did when creating The Compleat Booke of Experiments for the Fallen Jam.
What do you think about an itch.io game jam based on the Universal Formulary?
Make anything you want, but use the formulary as your inspiration: a book of potions, a tavern menu, a solo TTRPG about healing people, or a game about running competing apothecaries. Extra credit for using the Universal Formulary Art Pack.
Let me know in the poll and in the comments! There’s a good chance I’ll set it up and run it.
DOWNLOAD: Universal Formulary Art Asset Pack
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- E.P. 💀