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 State University of New York at Plattsburgh argues in "Beatrix Potter: Writing in Code" that the charm of "Appley Dapply's Nursery Rhymes" lies in the illustrations rather than the text, and that the book (like other nursery rhyme collections) is not a sustained narrative but a series of short verses. Such collections are typically unified in style and design, but "Appley Dapply" lacks this unity because the illustrations range over a number of years in which Potter's style changed significantly. The illustrations for the opening verse about Appley Dapply, for example, date from 1891 and reveal an artist with an