Read’s own remarks draw an explicit contrast between the disease on its first appearance and in his own later experience. Everyone knows now, he says, how to treat the French pox, “the disease daylie dying and wearing away by the exquisite cure thereof”—which may be taken to mean, at least, a notable mitigation of the constitutional effects[849]. The treatment, however, must have been much less effective then than now. Clowes speaks of a class who “either for shame will not bewray it, or for lack of good chirurgions know not how to remedy it, or for lack of ability are not able otherwise to provide for the cure of it.” The expense of a cure would have been considerable, to judge by the case given above from an account-book of the year 1503. Unable to employ “good chirurgions,” the poorer class would resort to quacks, of whose practice, in that and other diseases, we have some glimpses both from Clowes in London and from Read in Gloucester and Bristol. Of one irregular practitioner Clowes says, “He did compound for fifteen pound to rid him within three fits of his ague, and to make him as whole as a fish of all diseases.” There was still a lower order of empirics, whom Clowes disdained to contend with:
“Yet I do not mean to speak of the old woman at Newington, beyond St George’s Fields, unto whom the people do resort as unto an oracle; neither will I speak of the woman on the Bankside, who is as cunning as the horse at the Cross Keys; nor yet of the cunning woman in Seacole Lane, who hath more skill in her cole-basket than judgment in urine, or knowledge in physic or surgery”—nor of many others who are compared to “moths in clothes,” to “canker,” and to “rust in iron.”
Read gives an account of a travelling mountebank, which is too graphic to be omitted:
“In this year, 1587, there came a Fleming into the city of Glocester named Woolfgange Frolicke, and there hanging forth his pictures, his flags, his instruments, and his letters of mart with long lybells, great tossells, broad scales closed in boxes, with such counterfeit shows and knacks of knavery, cozening the people of their money, without either learning or knowledge. And yet for money got him a licence to practise at Bristow. But when he came to Gloceter, and being called before some being in authority by myself and others, he was not able to answer to any one point in chirurgerie; which being perceived, and the man known, the matter was excused by way of charity, to be good to straungers.”
One of the most systematic and detailed surgical treatises of the time, John Banister’s book on the “general and particular curation of ulcers” (1575), is significant for the indirect way in which it refers to the lues venerea.
Thus at folio 25, “the malignant ulcer called cacoethes” is described without anything said of a venereal origin, but the specific guaiacum is given among the remedies. The same is the ease on the 31st and 32nd leaves, which treat of “filthie and putrefied ulcers,” guaiacum being again prescribed. At folio 51, on ulcers of the mouth, it is said, “If it proceed a morbo venereo, then first begin with due purgation, and prescribe the party a thin diet with the decoction of guaiacum, and use ointments requisite for that disease, strengthening the inner parts. Use twice a day a sublimated water, as is afore written, to touch the ulcer with lint rolled therein:
| Rec. | Aqua Rosar. | } | an. two |
| & Plantag. | ounces, | ||
| Sublimati i dragme. | |||
Boil them in a glass bottel till the sublimate be dissolved.”
On fol. 57, he describes “ulcers of the privie parts,” among which are corroding ulcers, but without reference to the lues. It is in the section headed, “To prepare the humours” (fol. 61) that the most explicit reference occurs: “When the ulcers proceed through the French pockes, a thinne diet must be used, with the decoction of guaiacum or use universall unctions ex Hydrargyro[850].”
In 1596 there appeared Peter Lowe’s essay on The Spanish Sickness[851], which is purely a product of experience abroad, his own or of others, and is mainly doctrinal or theoretical. The other properly English works on the subject are all subsequent to the Restoration, and do not come into the period of this volume, nor, from an epidemiological point of view, into this work at all.