Let’s say you’re making a tincture out of some grass or berries or flowers or bark or whatever that seems to fix your headache really well. It tastes kinda gross but you’ve figured out how to steep it in boiling water then simmer it down into a syrup that you can throw back as one quick gulp.
You gotta be careful with the strength though, you’ve noticed that if you boil it too long you (or your patient) start bruising a bunch and their cuts bleed for a really long time or one or two might even have died. Alternately, steeping / simmering too long might actually cook off whatever substance you need and make it weaker.
It’s not too hard to get the volumes consistent batch-to-batch, you just use the same measuring vessel every time or the same counter weights on your scale, but the timing is difficult. You need to steep then simmer it for the same amount of time each time to produce consistent results. This is, say 500 B.C. or so (or any other time period in history where stovetop timers aren’t really a thing)–
–so you sing a little song or prayer or poem while you stir. It takes you roughly the same amount of time to recite it each time, so you know you’ll be getting roughly the same strength each time. Another option is you can burn a candle with a metal weight stuck through the wax at a given height then wait for it to clatter onto the metal plate you’ve got it set on.
You might even write down these measurements and which song has the right length or what type of candle burns as the right speed. Then when the judge in town wants your dead husband’s land and is mad that you told his wife that other dudes have no problem making their wives orgasm they’ll raid your house, find your recipe book, and use it as evidence at your trial before burning you for witchcraft.
Best of luck!
Don’t look at my liver I’m shy! 😳
This took me way too long to get.
Tap for spoiler
The rabbits hate living there, so they drink. Drinking is bad for their livers. So you can tell the place is a bad place to live from their livers.
I interpreted it as the humans who said “wow true” to it being a good easy to see if the place was healthy were assuming liver damage from eg heavy metals in the water sources in the area or something, but in reality the rabbit livers don’t tell you much about the area, just whether the rabbits themselves were degenerate drunks 😂
In my head, maybe based on reading, this sort of divination doesn’t have much connection ot the health of whatever, but is based on the reading of the random shape/orientation something takes when cast… so that was an extra layer I had to get through because that kind of reading wouldn’t detect cirrohsis.
Edit: I have defamed the science of entrail reading! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruspex
i think especially the color was being evaluated for animal livers. which does correlate to various things.
Today’s random deep dive:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruspex
Does look like a examination of the liver itself.
It’s also worth noting that there is an extremely contagious parasite among rabbits, which causes white calloused spots on their liver. It is spread via feces, and rabbits (like most herbivores) eat the same plants that they poop on. If you’re hunting rabbits, one of the steps in field dressing your kills is checking the liver for spots. Because if it’s spotted, the rabbit is sick.
This is a phenomenon I see a lot. Things like the mosaic laws aren’t currently necessary, but they’re a pretty good way to keep a group of people culturally cohesive and safe in a desert climate without refrigeration. Similarly, sounds just below our audible hearing range can produce feelings of unease, interrupt sleep, and cause visual disturbances… so you know, a bunch of those old houses that people thought were haunted, while not haunted, likely had old plumbing or something similar that was vibrating at a low frequency and actually causing a physical effect.
