Hubert. The king, I fear, is poison’d by a monk: I left him almost speechless. * * * Bastard. How did he take it? who did taste to him? Hubert. A monk, I tell you; a resolved villain, Whose bowels suddenly burst out: the king Yet speaks, and, peradventure, may recover. King John, Act V., Sc. VI.
You shall digest the venom of your spleen, Though it do split you! Julius Cæsar, Act IV., Sc. III.
If they had swallow’d poison ’t would appear By external swelling: but she looks like sleep. Antony and Cleopatra, Act V., Sc. II.
K. John. There is so hot a summer in my bosom, That all my bowels crumble up to dust: I am a scribbled form, drawn with a pen Upon a parchment; and against this fire Do I shrink up. P. Henry. How fares your majesty? K. John. Poison’d,—ill fare; dead, forsook, cast off: And none of you will bid the winter come, To thrust his icy fingers in my maw; Nor let my kingdom’s rivers take their course Through my burn’d bosom; nor entreat the north To make his bleak winds kiss my parched lips, And comfort me with cold: I do not ask you much, I beg cold comfort; and you are so strait, And so ingrateful, you deny me that. * * * Within me is a hell; and there the poison Is, as a fiend, confin’d to tyrannize On unreprievable condemned blood. King John, Act V., Sc. VII.
Within the infant rind of this weak flower Poison hath residence, and medicine power: For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part; Being tasted, slays all senses with the heart. Romeo and Juliet, Act II., Sc. III.
Like a poisonous mineral, gnaw my inwards. Othello, Act II., Sc. I.
I bought an unction of a mountebank, So mortal, that but dip a knife in it, Where it draws blood no cataplasm so rare Collected from all simples that have virtue Under the moon, can save the thing from death That is but scratch’d withal. Hamlet, Act IV., Sc. VII.
A few miscellaneous quotations referring to medical subjects must here find a place.
The more one sickens the worse at ease he is. As You Like It, Act III., Sc. II.
He fell sick suddenly, and grew so ill He could not sit his mule. Henry VIII., Act IV., Sc. II.