Let air you breathe be sunny, clear, and light,
Free from disease or cess-pool’s fetted blight.
Taking “a hair of the dog that bit you” was, however, a maxim with Salernitans for the cure of potation headaches.
Art sick from vinous surfeiting at night?
Repeat the dose at morn, ’twill set thee right.
The tradition with regard to the difficulty of the digestion of pork, which we are trying to combat in the modern time, had already been established at Salerno. The digestibility of pork could, however, be improved by good wine.
Inferior far to lamb is flesh of swine,
Unqualified by gen’rous draughts of wine;
But add the wine, and lo! you’ll quickly find
In them both food and medicine combined.
Milk for consumptives was a favourite recommendation. The tradition had come down from very old times, and Galen insisted that fresh air and milk and eggs was the best possible treatment for consumption. The Salernitan physicians recommended various kinds of milk, goat’s, camel’s, ass’s, and sheep’s milk as well as cow’s. It is probable, as I pointed out in my “Psychotherapy,” that the mental influence of taking some one of the unusual forms of milk did a good deal to produce a favourable reaction in consumptives, who are so prone to be affected favourably by unusual remedies. The Regimen warned, however, that milk will not be good if it produces headache or if there is fever. Apparently some patients had been seen with the idiosyncrasy for milk, and the tendency to constipation and disturbance after it which have been noted also in the modern time.
Goat’s milk and camel’s, as by all is known,
Relieve poor mortals in consumption thrown;
While ass’s milk is deemed far more nutritious,
And e’en beyond all cow’s or sheep’s, officious.
But should a fever in the system riot,
Or headache, let the patient shun this diet.
Salerno’s common sense with regard to diet is very well illustrated by a number of maxims. Diet tinkering was not much in favour.
We hold that men on no account should vary
Their daily diet until necessary:
For, as Hippocrates doth truly show,
Diseases sad from all such changes flow.
A stated diet, as it is well known,
Of physic is the strongest cornerstone—
By means of which, if you can nought impart,
Relief or cure, vain is your Healing Art.
They believed firmly that many of the conditions of eating were quite as important as the diet itself, and said: