Take of the flesh of a sound young man, dying a natural death about the middle of August, three or four pounds. Let the flesh be taken from his thighs or other fleshy parts. Put it into a fit glass and pour upon it spirit of wine. Let it stand so three or four days. Take out the flesh and put it upon a glass plate, and imbibe it with spirits of salts. Let it stand uncovered, but in the shade, where no dust or other filth may fall upon it. Be sure you often turn it, and, being well dried, you may put it up in a fit jar and keep it for use.—Aurora Chymica, chap. iii.
A still more efficacious remedy, “producing wonderful effects both in preserving and restoring health,” may be obtained by distilling, filtering, calcining, and coagulating this “Mummiall” till it have a “saccharine taste,” when the “matter may be left of the thickness or consistency of honey, which must be kept in glass vessels closely shut.” (Ibid., p. 8.)
If the “sound young man” should have been killed in the spring instead of in “the middle of August,” the learned Dr. Bolnest is not without a remedy. His flesh is, indeed, no longer useful for a “Mummiall,” but his blood may be made into a “very high balsam, exceeding much the powers and virtue of natural balsam; a potent preservative in time of pestilence, leprosie, palsie, and gout of all sorts.”
“Take of such blood a large quantity. Gather in glass vessels. Let it settle some time till it hath thrown out all its waterish humor, which separate by wary inclination. Take now of this concrete blood five or six pounds, which put to ten or twelve pints of spirits of wine. Shake them well together, and let it digest six or eight days in warm ashes.” Distil. Add the fixed salt drawn out of the caput mortuum of the blood by “calcination,” “solution,” “filtration,” “coagulation,” often repeated; “and what shall remain behind is the Arcanum of Blood” (p. 10).
When obtained in the manner above described, this invaluable remedy is “to be taken in broth or treacle-water with a fasting” (and let us devoutly hope an unusually vigorous) “stomach.” Only one caution is necessary. The “sound young man’s” blood must have been shed “when Mercury was above the horizon and in conjunction with the sun in Gemini or Virgo.”
After the broth of man’s blood, a “Balsamick Remedy for Arthritick Pains,” composed of the bones of a man “which hath not been buried fully a year,” beat up into a powder, calcined, and applied on lint, appears a comparatively mild and pleasant receipt. So, likewise, is the “Quintessence of Toads,” to be composed in the month of June or July of a “great quantity of overgrown toads,” reduced, calcined, and distilled as usual, and then “dissolved in spirit of oranges or treacle-water ready for use,” either externally, when it cures “cancers and pestilential venom,” or internally, against “all sorts of poison.”
The above prescriptions are taken, be it said, not from the manual of one of those vulgar quacks to whom we are too apt to credit every absurdity of ancient medicine, but from a serious treatise by Edward Bolnest, physician in ordinary to the King (1672), dedicated to George Duke of Buckingham, and described on the title-page as “Shewing a Rational [!] Way of preparing Animals, Vegetables, and Minerals for a Physical Use, by which they are made most efficacious, safe, and pleasant Medicines for the Preservation and Restoration of the Life of Man.” How honest was the worthy author in his belief in his “Mummiall Quintessence,” and all the rest, may be judged from his frank avowal “to the Reader” that the medicines prescribed he might “in some measure in time of need trust to,” because, adds Dr. Bolnest candidly, “I never yet from the best of medicines always found those certain effects I could have desired.”
These were, however, refined preparations compared to the prescriptions in use in still earlier generations. In the great folio of M. Pietro Andrea Matthioli (Venice, 1621), adorned with hundreds of really admirable woodcuts of medicinal herbs and flowers, there are directions for rubbing wounds with cow-dung, swallowing beeswax, silk, sweat, and saliva, and drinking hare’s blood and dog’s dung dissolved in milk as a cure for dysentery. Nervous people are to dine on cooked vipers. Persons with the toothache are to apply to their teeth a serpent’s skin steeped in vinegar, or to powder the callosities on a horse’s legs, and stuff their ears therewith. A black eye may be treated with a poultice of human milk, incense, and the blood of a tortoise. For the not very serious affection of hiccough a beverage is recommended, of which the chief ingredient is the flesh of a mummy; thus affording us further evidence that cannibalism survived in medicine, and was approved by the faculty in Italy as well as England, down to a very recent period. Besides these “strange meats,” Matthioli regularly classifies in a table a multitude of what he is pleased to call “simple medicines,” among which are to be found the bodies, or parts of bodies, of wolves, scorpions, centipedes, ostriches, beavers, and dogs, the cast-off skins of serpents, the horns of unicorns (when attainable!), the hoofs of asses and goats, beeswax, silk, asphalt, and several filthy substances which cannot here be named. Albertus Magnus (vide the curious little black-letter volume, Le Grat Albert, in the British Museum) orders nervous patients to eat eagles’ brains, whereby they may acquire the courage of the king of birds; while the brains of the owl, the goat, the camel, etc., convey the peculiar qualities of each of those animals. Pliny’s great work, it is needless to say, is a repertory of marvellous counsels and observations. Earth taken out of a human skull acts as a depilatory, and benefit is derived from chewing plants which have happened to grow in the same unpleasant receptacle. On the principle, we presume, of “I am not the rose, but I have dwelt near the rose,” herbs growing on a manure heap are found especially efficacious as remedies for quinsy. The hair of man, taken from a cross, is good for quartan fevers, and human ear-wax is the only proper application to a wound occasioned by a human bite. The uses of saliva are numberless, and fill a whole chapter of the Natural History. “Fasting spittle,” in particular, applied to the eyes, is an infallible cure for ophthalmia,—a remedy which Persius treats with blameworthy scepticism as an old-womanly practice. In cases where bread has stuck in the throat, a piece of the same loaf should be inserted in the ears. The use of the fluid which exudes from the pores of the skin is so valuable that (Pliny assures us) the owners of the Grecian gymnasia made a thriving trade by selling the scrapings of the bodies of athletes, which, “compounded with oil, is of an emollient, calorific, and expletive nature.” If any lady desire to cultivate an interesting and pallid appearance, she ought to imitate Drusus, who drank goats’ blood to make it appear that his enemy Cassius had poisoned him. For melancholy (an affection which seems to have given great concern to the old doctors), Dioscorides recommends black hellebore held in the mouth,—certainly a recipe on homœopathic principles, since a mouthful of hellebore would scarcely naturally serve, like the Psalmist’s wine and oil, either to make glad the heart of man or to give him a cheerful countenance. A better remedy for the same melancholy is “broth of old cock,” our Scotch friend cockaleekie.
For some unexplained reason, two only among the ills to which flesh is heir, and they among the most serious,—frenzy and inflammation of the stomach,—seem to have escaped from the dread régime of Sacrificial Medicine, and indeed are treated with surprising lenity. Dioscorides thinks that frenzy can be cured by asparagus and white wine, and considers that the patient suffering from gastritis should have a plaster of roses applied to the seat of his disease!
Besides the “exhibition” of nauseous and revolting draughts, boluses, and pills, the system of Sacrificial Medicine has at all times commanded many other ingenious resources for the creation of unnecessary pain, trouble, and annoyance to sick persons and their friends. If, for example, a stiff-necked patient were unmanageable in the matter of some particularly disagreeable dose, he might still be induced to go on vexing nature by some out-of-the-way diet, and potions repeated at stated intervals, till faith or life succumbed in the struggle. One old physician, Ætius, in this way prescribed for the gout a separate dietary for every month of a whole year. Another, the great Alexander of Tralles, ordained three hundred and sixty-five potions, so arranged as to furnish out a course for two years; whereupon Dr. Friend, the learned author of the History of Physick, remarks that “his receipts were as good as any of those which our new pretenders to physick make use of,” but adds the discouraging dictum, “After all, gout is a distemper with which it were best not to tamper.”