Puslapio vaizdai
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leaves and pigeon's dung quilted in a bag, and laid hot upon the parts affected, was thought to help a stitch in the side; and for a quinsey, “give the party to drink," says Markham, "the herb mouse-ear, steept in ale or beer; and look when you see a swine rub himself, and there upon the same place rub a slick-stone, and then with it slick all the swelling, and it will cure it."

To make hair grow on a bald part of the head, garden snails were to be plucked out of their houses, and pounded with horse-leeches, bees, wasps and salt, an equal quantity of each; and the baldness was to be anointed with the moisture from this mixture after it had been buried eight days in a hot bed. For the removal and extirpation of superfluous hairs, a depilatory was to be made by drowning in a pint of wine as many green frogs as it would cover, (about twenty was the number,) setting the pot forty days in the sun, and then straining it for use.

A water specially good against gravel or dropsy might be distilled from the dried and pulverized blood of a black buck or he-goat, three or four years old. The animal was to be kept by him

self, in the summer time when the sun was in Leo, and dieted for three weeks upon certain herbs given in prescribed order, and to drink nothing but red wine, if you would have the best preparation, though some persons allowed him his fill of water every third day. But there was a water of mans blood which in Queen Elizabeth's days was a new invention, “whereof some princes had very great estimation, and used it for to remain thereby in their force, and, as they thought, to live long." A young man was to be chosen, in his flourishing youth, and of twenty-five years, and somewhat choleric by nature. He was to be well dieted for one month with light and healthy meats, and with all kinds of spices, and with good strong wine, and moreover to be kept with mirth; at the month's end veins in both arms were to be opened, and as much blood to be let out as he could "tolerate and abide." One handful of salt was to be added to six pounds of this blood, and this was to be seven times distilled, pouring the water upon the residuum after every distillation, till the last. This was to be taken three or four

times a year, an ounce at a time. One has sight of a theory here; the life was thought to be in the blood, and to be made transferable when thus extracted.

Richard Braithwait, more famous since Mr. Haslewood has identified him with Drunken Barnaby, than as author of " the English Gentleman and the English Gentlewoman, presented to present times for ornaments, and commended to posterity for precedents," says of this Gentlewoman, " herbals she peruseth, which she seconds with conference; and by degrees so improves her knowledge, as her cautelous care perfits many a dangerous cure." But herbals were not better guides than the medical books of which specimens have just been set before the reader, except that they did not lead the practitioner so widely and perilously astray. "Had Solomon," says the author of Adam in Eden, or the Paradise of Plants," that great proficient in all sublunary experiments, preserved those many volumes that he wrote in this kind, for the instruction of future ages, so great was that spaciousness of mind that God bestowed on him, that he had immediately

under the deity been the greatest of Doctors for the preservation of mankind: but with the loss of his books so much lamented by the Rabbins and others, the best part of this herbarary art hath since groaned under the defects of many unworthy authors, and still remains under divers clouds and imperfections." This writer, "the ingeniously learned and excellent Herbarist Mr. William Coles," professing as near as possible to acquaint all sorts of people with the very pith and marrow of herbarism, arranges his work according to the anatomical application of plants," appropriating," says he, to "every part of the body, (from the crown of the head, with which I begin, and proceed till I come to the sole of the foot,) such herbs and plants whose grand uses and virtues do most specifically, and by signature thereunto belong, not only for strengthening the same, but also for curing the evil effects whereunto they are subjected:"—the signatures being as it were the books out of which the ancients first learned the virtues of herbs; Nature, or rather the God of Nature, having stamped on divers of them legible characters to discover their uses, though he hath left others

without any, that after he had shewed them the way, they, by their labour and industry which renders every thing more acceptable, might find out the rest. It was an opinion often expressed by a physician of great and deserved celebrity, that in course of time specifics would be discovered for every malady to which the human frame is liable. He never supposed, (though few men have ever been more sanguine in their hopes and expectations,) that life was thus to be indefinitely prolonged, and that it would be man's own fault, or his own choice, if he did not live for ever but he thought that when we should thus have been taught to subdue those diseases which cut our life short, we should, like the Patriarchs, live out the number of our days, and then fall asleep,-Man being by this physical redemption restored to his original corporeal state.

Then shall like four straight pillars, the four Elements
Support the goodly structure of Mortality:

Then shall the four Complexions, like four heads

Of a clear river, streaming in his body,

Nourish and comfort every vein and sinew:

No sickness of contagion, no grim death,

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