This tasty-looking fruit is from a medical text – Medical Botany: or, Illustrations and Descriptions of the Medicinal Plants of the London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Pharmacopoeias; Including a Popular and Scientific Description of Poisonous Plants, written by a doctor, John Stephenson, and a fellow of the Medico-Botanical Society, James Morss Churchill. The picture was painted by W. Clark.
The pomegranate, the text tells us, was called “Punic apple” by the Romans, “Venus is fabled to have planted the first in Cyprus,” and “Pliny refers to it in the following terms : ‘Interior Africa ad Garamantas usque, et deserta pahnarum magnitudine, et suauitate constat, nobilibus maxime circa delubrum Hammonis. Sed circa Carthaginem Punicum malum cognomine sibi vindicat.'” My Latin is not good enough to know what all that means, but it’s a fruit that has been studied for a long time, and used for everything from tanning (hides, that is) to, um, “relaxation of the gums and throat, for chronic diarrhoea, blenorrhagia, prolapsus of the rectum or uterus, &c.”
Happy New Year. May your gums and throat remain relaxed with or without a splash of grenadine.