Mustard after food.
He who cleans his teeth with the point of his knife may soon clean them with the haft.
A dry cough is the trumpet of death.”
One of the laws of Howel Dda permitted divorce for so trifling a cause as an unsavoury or disagreeable breath.[676]
Poppies bruised in wine were used to induce sleep. For agues the treatment was to write in three apples on three separate days an invocation to the Trinity; “on the third day he will recover.” Saffron was used for many complaints; it is a drug still largely used by the poor, who have unbounded faith in it, but it is almost inert. If a person lost his reason, he was ordered to take primrose juice, “and he will indeed recover.” There were regular tables of lucky and unlucky days for bleeding. Fennel juice was supposed to act as a sort of anti-fat, and the roots of thistles were given as a purgative. If a snake should crawl into a man’s mouth, the patient was to take camomile powder in wine. An irritable man was to drink celery juice; “it will produce joy.” As we might have expected, the leek was supposed to have many virtues; wives who desired children were told to eat leeks. Leek juice and woman’s milk was good for whooping cough. The juice was also used for deafness, heart-burn, headache, and boils. Mustard purifies the brain, is an antidote to the bite of an adder, is good for colic, loss of hair, palsy, and many other things. To ascertain the fate of a sick person, bruise violets and apply them to the eyebrows; “if he sleep, he will live, but if not he will die.”
Radishes were supposed to prevent hydrophobia. “That is the greatest remedy, to remove a bone from the brain (to trephine) with safety.” Dittany was the antidote for pain. Mouse-dung was used as a remedy for spitting of blood, and a plaster of cow-dung for gout. An eye-water was made from rotten apples. The berries of mistletoe were made into a confection as a remedy for epilepsy. “Let the sick person eat a good mouthful (they gave large doses in those days) thereof, fasting morning, noon, and night. It is proven.” Sage was supposed to strengthen the nerves (nerves in those days!). Nettles, goose-grass, blessed-thistle, and rosemary were favourite remedies. Then we have numerous curious charms and “medical feats discovered through the grace of God.” Here is one: “Take a frog alive from the water, extract his tongue (frogs have long been subject to vivisection), and put him again in the water. Lay this same tongue upon the heart of sleeping man, and he will confess his deeds in his sleep.” A charm for the toothache runs thus: “Saint Mary sat on a stone, the stone being near her hermitage, when the Holy Ghost came to her, she being sad. Why art thou sad, mother of my Lord, and what pain tormenteth thee? My teeth are painful, a worm called megrim has penetrated them, and I have masticated and swallowed it. I adjure thee, daffin O negrbina, by the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, the Virgin Mary, and God, the munificent physician, that thou dost not permit any disease, dolour, or molestation to affect this servant of God here present, either in tooth, eye, head, or in the whole of her teeth together. So be it. Amen.”
All the herbs and plants (so far as was possible) which were used in the doctor’s practice were directed to be grown by him in his garden and orchard, so that they might be at hand when required.
In the table of weights and measures used by the ancient Welsh physicians, we learn that twenty grains of wheat make one scruple, four podfuls make one spoonful, four spoonfuls make one eggshellful, four eggshellfuls make one cupful. The physician also for his guidance had the following curious table:—Four grains of wheat = one pea, four peas = one acorn, four acorns = one pigeon’s egg, four pigeon’s eggs = one hen’s egg, four hen’s eggs = one goose’s egg, four goose’s eggs = one swan’s egg.
“For treating a stroke on the head unto the brain, a stroke in the body unto the bowels, and the breaking of one of the four limbs, the wounded person was to receive three pounds from the one who wounded him; and that person had also to pay for the medical treatment of the sufferer a pound without food, or nine-score pence with his food, and the bloody clothes.”[677]
The physicians of Myddvai recognised five kinds of fevers; viz., latent, intermittent, ephemeral, inflammatory, and typhus. The doctor’s “three master difficulties” were a wounded lung, a wounded mammary gland, and a wounded knee joint. “There are three bones which will never unite when broken—a tooth, the knee pan, and the os frontis.”