The Book of Human Skin by Michelle Lovric Page A

bash an eyelid. I caught his eye and quickly turned back into my idiot-drooling self, the abstruse one that twere safest to be round him.
    ‘Don’t pertain to me,’ he dekklared, swaggering oft. All the servants, there blood up, sayed slurs at him like they would niver ornery dare, tho naturally they waited till he were almost out o hearing.
    Cristina finely spat the apple out o her mouth and begun to wail at the blood squirting out o my wound.
    Anna stitched n dressed my hand, using a burned needle n a clean cloth, so there were no longlastin damidge. Except that wheniver after I saw the young Master, a stab o pain went through my palm. Sumtimes it doed that too, when he wernt there, but were up to evil elsewheres. And Cristina were taken away by kind Piero Zen, my Mistress Donata Fasan’s assistant husband, to live n work in his homonymouse palazzo . He knew twere not safe for her no more at the Palazzo Espagnol. Anna n I messed her sorely. That were one more peace of good gone out of all our lives on count of Minguillo Fasan.
    My Mistress were in her fifth month so she were spared the story o the croosyfied Cristina. For Conte Piero were worrit it mite bring on the birthing pains too early isn’t it.
    Doctor Santo Aldobrandini
    Skin’s drama will usually make its first eruption in early adolescence.
    I feel a special compassion for my pimpled patients, who often come to me at that tender age when appearance is all, and all is blighted. They feel they are dying, not of disease, but shame. For the person whose face is marked in ignominy must always be conscious of the disgust of those with whom he stands at close quarters. At best, his companions pity the distempered blood they read on the raddled skin; at worst, they wonder what moral corruption is embossed in the cutaneous putrescence.
    The poor sufferer runs to the apothecary, oftentimes at his – or, more likely, her – peril. In my time in Venice there were many skin preparations on the market. All promised to alchemize an ugly outbreak into silken skin with the lustre of pearls. Most were harmless waters drugged with alcohol and sugar. A picturesque name usually conjured some exotic provenance: the Grand Sultan’s Elixir, The Maiden’s Dew, The Milk of the Candelabra Cactus, and so on. Venetians love entertainment: such names alone charmed the gold out of the pockets of the rich. That these hypocritical juices were bought by the poor instead of solid food was the quacks’ true crime.
    I do not rant or preach. I would judge most of the cheaper preparations worth the few soldi they cost for a sense of feeling better and a mood actually lightened by the wine. Some, like Bezoar Stone (manufactured in the belly of the Peruvian llama), might in fact speed an infertile woman towards conception. And the Bark of Peru, from the chinchona tree, is known to treat the symptoms of the Sweating Sickness most effectively, though none of the above have the least effect upon the skin.
    Yet for every quack that peddles pretty water, there is one who murders drop by drop. A few of these Venetian skin preparations were actually dangerous, containing poisons and corrosives that might weaken a victim for ever, or even kill at high dosage. The worst I would ever come across was also the costliest. It went by the name of ‘The Tears of Santa Rosa’, and was all the rage in Venice when I was a young man just setting out on my career in skin.
    Whichever pharmaceutical criminal had conjured it, he aimed his sights on the rich. The nastier the taste or smell and the higher the price, the more effective such people believed a medicine must be. They adored the double sacrifice of hurting their purse and disgusting their mouth or nose: the cure would be more exquisitely imagined in this way.
    Despite its rankly oversweet odour, the affluent Venetians would be constitutionally unable to resist ‘The Tears of Santa Rosa’. For the hairdressers who disseminated it gave out such a