Reginald Scott, in a work written in the sixteenth century, gives the following recipe for making an anæsthetic: “Take of opium, mandragora bark and henbane root, equal parts; pound them together, and mix with water. When you want to sew or cut a man, dip a rag in this, and put it to his forehead and nostrils. He will soon sleep so deeply that you may do what you will. To wake him up, dip the rag in strong vinegar. The same is excellent in brain-fever, when the patient cannot sleep; for if he cannot sleep, he will die.”
Anæsthesia in romance
The writers and poets of mediæval romance in more than one instance allude to anæsthesia produced by drugs. Boccaccio, who wrote his “Decameron” in 1352, in the story of Dionius, alludes to a certain anæsthetic liquid of Surgeon Mazzeo della Montagna, of Salerno. “The doctor,” he says, “supposing that the patient would never be able to endure the pain without a soporific, deferred the operation until the evening, and in the meantime ordered the water to be distilled from a certain composition, which, being drunk, would throw a person asleep as long as he judged it necessary.” Boccaccio, probably, borrowed his idea from the recipe given by Nichols, a provost of the famous old school of Salerno, who published a recipe for making an anæsthetic, similar to that of Reginald Scott.
In Brooke’s “Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Julietta,” printed in 1562, which supplied Shakespeare with the plot and much material for his play “Romeo and Juliet,” Friar Laurence thus speaks to Julietta: “I have learned and proved of long time the composition of a certain paste which I make of divers somniferous simples, which beated afterwards to powdere, and dronke with a quantitie of water, within a quarter of an houre after, bringeth the receiver into such a sleepe, and burieth so deeply the senses and other spirits of life that the cunningest phistian will judge the party died.
“And, besides that, it hath a more marvellous effect, for the person which useth the same feeleth no kind of grief, and, according to the quantitie of the draught, the patient remaineth in a sweete sleepe; but when the operation is perfect and done, he returneth unto his first estate.”
A Surgeon Amputating a Leg
From a woodcut of the XVI century
Shakespeare’s references to mandragora, poppy and other “drowsy syrups,” are too well known to need quotation; but the following allusion by Middleton, in his play called “Women beware Women!” is not without interest:—
I’ll imitate the pities of old surgeons