Wormwood has always had a high reputation as a medicine, and was chiefly used as a tonic. It yields an essential oil with an extremely bitter taste, which is yet largely used in France in the manufacture of absinthe.
In one of his Sonnets, Shakespeare alludes to the old alembic of the alchemist in the following lines:—
“What potions have I drunk of Syren tears,
Distill’d from limbecks foul as hell within”.
And in the following verse he deals with some theories of medical treatment:—
“Like as to make our appetites more keen,
With eager compounds we our palate urge;
As, to prevent our maladies unseen,
We sicken to shun sickness when we purge:
Even so, being full of your ne’er-cloying sweetness,
To bitter sauces did I frame my feeding,
And, sick of welfare, found a kind of meetness
To be diseas’d, ere that there was true needing.
Thus policy in love, to anticipate
The ills that were not, grew to faults assur’d,
And brought to medicine a healthful state
Which, rank of goodness, would by ill be cur’d.
But thence I learn, and find the lesson true,
Drugs poison him that so fell sick of you.”[38]
CHAPTER III.
SPENSER.
Edmund Spenser was born in London towards the close of the year 1552, and in his after career, added lustre to an age which for brilliancy in literature has never been equalled in the history of this country. He lived for some time in Lancashire in his early days, but in 1578 quitted the country for the court. It was probably his friend Sir Walter Raleigh who introduced him to court-favour and Queen Elizabeth. In 1589 he published the Faerie Queen, a poem which will ever live in English literature.
There are few allusions in the works of Edmund Spenser to medicinal plants, although he frequently mentions salves and other methods of administration used in the leechcraft of his time, as instanced in the following quotations:—
“Eftsoons he gan apply relief
Of salves and med’cines which has passing prefe”.[39]