Early modern medicine knew thousands of medicines and possible treatments that could be found in guidebooks, medical dissertations, herbaria, and dispensaries. The article presents the characteristics of the basic sources of the history of medicine, as well as their specifi city and the range of information they provide. The aim is to show possible source selection method in an attempt to describe a real picture of the therapeutic methods most commonly used by the offi cial medicine in Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

The present paper deals with a late medieval culinary collection, Liber Cure Cocorum. The collection differs from the other known culinary manuscripts of the time due to its being written in verse. Altogether the poem consists of 137 recipes and four other fragments which introduce four sections of the collection: pottages, sauces, roast foods and ‘small cookery’. Most of the instructions included in Liber Cure Cocorum are known from other medieval collections, written in prose (cf. Hieatt 2006). In the article the collection will be analysed from two perspectives. First, the struc-ture of culinary poems will be discussed in order to examine the degree of their compliance with the traditional model of the medieval recipe. Next, although the authorship of the collection is anonymous, we will try to reveal who its author was and whom he meant as the target audience. For this purpose, we will pay attention to fragments in which the author directly refers to himself and/or to the potential reader. Additionally, any details included in the particular recipe components which might expose the potential poet and/or the audience will be discussed. By looking closely at the structure of the recipes and the intended audience, we will try to an-swer the question why it was written in verse rather than in prose.

The continuous process of urbanization and climate change has led to severe urban heat island (UHI) effects. Constructing parks with cooling capabilities is considered an effective measure to alleviate UHI effects. However, most studies only quantify the cooling effect from a maximum value perspective, lacking a measure of temperature diffusion in space. This study combines the perspectives of maximum value and accumulation to define a cold island index, quantifying the cooling effect of 40 urban parks in the main urban area of Xi'an city. The results show that, on average, urban parks can reduce the surrounding environment by approximately 2.3℃, with a cooling range of about 127.1ha, which is three times the park area. Different factors drive the measurement of the cooling effect using different cold island indexes, but all indexes are highly correlated with green space area. There are significant differences in the cooling effect among different types of parks, and overall, ecological parks have the best cooling effect. The directional spread of internal cold islands in parks is most related to park shape, while external spread is related to surrounding green spaces. The research results have practical value in the construction of parks with cooling effects and the sustainable development of cities in urban planning processes..