This printing plate is for an old-fashioned medical Q&A, covering all sorts of problems involving the mouth, everything from infected teeth and gumboils to cold sores and infections.

One of the things it talks about is the idea that the smallpox vaccination might help prevent recurring cold sores. It says some doctors believed this could be useful although it wasn't considered a widely accepted opinion.

Anothet section talks about what to give a child whose mouth is sore. The recommendation?

Milk, custard, and even ice cream.

This was probably intended as some kind of patient or public health information. And we've actually found other pieces from what appears to be from the same publication, covering things like tonsils, adenoids, infections and antibiotics.

So we're potentially looking at fragments of a medical publication from the early-to-mid twentieth century.

It's an actual piece of information that somebody once read, perhaps a parent trying to figure out what was wrong with their child or someone looking for advice about an illness.