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
Nursery rhyme Nursery rhyme A nursery rhyme is a traditional poem or song for children in Britain and many other countries, but usage of the term only dates from the late 18th/early 19th century. The term Mother Goose rhymes is interchangeable with nursery rhymes. From the mid-16th century nursery rhymes begin to be recorded in English plays, and most popular rhymes date from the 17th and 18th centuries. The first English collections, "Tommy Thumb's Song Book" and a sequel, "Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book", were published before 1744. Publisher John Newbery's stepson, Thomas Carnan, was the first to use the term Mother