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 as evidenced in the privately printed edition of "The Tailor of Gloucester". Her interest in rhymes was partly an attraction to the rhythms of older forms of English, and partly to the mysteries and riddles many rhymes presented. Potter took inspiration from childhood favourite Randolph Caldecott, especially his rhymes that gave prominent place to animals, and, in her 1902 correspondence with her editor Norman Warne about the publication of "Peter Rabbit", indicated she "sometimes thought of trying some of the other rhymes about animals, which [Caldecott] did not do." Following the publication of "The Tale of Peter Rabbit" in 1902,