Jack and Jill (nursery rhyme) and brown paper were a home cure used as a method to draw out bruises on the body. Jack is the most common name used in English-language nursery rhymes and represented an archetypal Everyman hero by the 18th century, while Jill or Gill had come to mean a young girl or a sweetheart by the end of the Middle Ages. However, the woodcut that accompanied the first recorded version of the rhyme showed two boys (not a boy and a girl) and used the spelling Gill not Jill. The true origin of the rhyme is unknown, but there are several
Appley Dapply's Nursery Rhymes Potter planned a book of nursery rhymes called "Appley Dapply", but Warne preferred her original (rather than her derivative work) and offered only modest encouragement. The project was dear to Potter's heart, and she continued to develop the concept while working on other productions for Warne. Potter planned "Appley Dapply" as a large format book with page borders and decorations in a style reminiscent of Walter Crane and Randolph Caldecott, and even considered publishing the book at her own expense if Warne lost what little interest he had in the project. In late 1904 she offered Warne a dummy book