The Librarian's Regimen — Health, nutrition and medicine — one question at a time, from the studies

A page from a fifteenth-century Tacuinum sanitatis: in a walled garden, a man in a rose-coloured coat lifts a basket heaped with cabbages onto his head while a woman in blue holds the gate — Harvesting cabbages, from Ibn Butlan's *Tacuinum sanitatis* — an eleventh-century Arabic handbook of health, here in a Latin copy painted around 1445–1450 (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Latin 9333, f. 53). The genre that gave this publication its name: a *regimen* was the whole of how you lived. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons / Gallica.

Health, nutrition and medicine — one question at a time, from the studies

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SEPTEMBER 10, 2026 What a Kidney Stone Actually Is, and Why It Forms About one adult in ten will make a kidney stone. Before the questions about water, calcium and what to eat, the first one: what a stone actually is, what it is made of, and why it forms in some kidneys and not others — read from the studies. With a postscript on hard water, distillers, and calcium pills.

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