The same writer gives a curious receipt for “Buttered Beere,” which is good for a cough or shortness of wind:—Take a quart or more of Double Beere and put to it a good piece of fresh butter, sugar candie an ounce, of liquerise in powder, of ginger grated, of each a dramme, and {414} if you would have it strong, put in as much long pepper and Greynes, let it boyle in the quart in the manner as you burne wine and who so will drink it, let him drinke it as hot as hee may suffer. Some put in the yolke of an egge or two towards the latter end, and so they make it more strengthfull.“
The following year John Taylor published in Drinke and Welcome many modes of application of ale in the various ills to which the flesh is heir. He thus concludes his somewhat remarkable statements:—”Ale is universale, and for Vertue it stands allowable with the best recipes of the most antientest Physisians; and for its singular force in expulsion of poison is equall, if not exceeding that rare antidote so seriously invented by the Pontique King, which from him (till this time) carries his name of Mithridate. And lastly, not onely approved by a Nationall Assembly, but more exemplarily remonstrated by the frequent use of the most knowing Physisians, who for the wonderfull force that it hath against all diseases of the Lungs, justly allow the name of a Pulmonist to every Alebrewer.
“The further I seeke to goe the more unable I finde myselfe to expresse the wonders (for so I may very well call them) operated by Ale for that I shall abruptly conclude, in consideratione of mine owne insufficiency, with the fagge-end of an old man’s old will, who gave a good somme of mony to a Red-fac’d Ale-drinker, who plaid upon a Pipe and Tabor, which was this:—
“To make your Pipe and Tabor keepe their sound, And dye your Crimson tincture more profound, There growes no better medicine on the ground Than Aleano (if it may be found) To buy which drug I give a hundred pound.”
Prynne, the author of the famous Histrio-Mastix, seldom dined; every three or four hours he munched a manchet, and refreshed his exhausted spirits with ale brought to him by his servant; and when “he was put into this road of writing,” as Anthony Wood telleth, he fixed on “a long quilted cap, which came an inch over his eyes,” serving as a shade, “and then hunger nor thirst did he experience, save that of his voluminous pages.” Evidence of the high regard in which English ale was held among foreign doctors in the seventeenth century may be gathered from an account given in Hone’s Table Book of how, about 1620 some doctors and surgeons during their attendance on an English gentleman, who was diseased at Paris, discoursed on wines and other {415} beverages; and one physician, who had been in England, said the English had a drink which they call Ale, and which he thought the wholesomest liquor that could be drunk; for whereas the body of man is supported by natural heat and radical moisture, there is no drink conduceth more to the preservation of the one, and the increase of the other, than Ale, for, while the Englishmen drank only ale, they were strong, brawny, able men, and could draw an arrow an ell long; but, when they fell to wine and Beer, they are found to be much impaired in their strength and age.
English doctors would always, it may be supposed, give their approbation to the nut-brown ale. There must have been some who even in the good old days leaned to the doctrines of the abstainers; but such was the faith of our ancestors in the virtues of the national beverage, that we may imagine the doctor’s advice was disregarded and, indeed, was even set down to anything but an amiable motive. This we may see from a verse of the old ballad, Nottingham Ale:—
Ye doctors, who more execution have done With bolus and potion, and powder and pill, Than hangman with halter, and soldier with gun, Or miser with famine, or lawyer with quill, To dispatch us the quicker, you forbid us malt liquor, Till our bodies grow thin, and our faces look pale; Observe them who pleases, what cures all diseases, Is a comforting dose of good Nottingham Ale.
The following receipt is quite gravely given by Dr. Solas Dodd, in whose Natural History of the Herring (1753) it may be found: “Take the oil pressed out of fresh Herrings, a pint, a boar’s gall, juices of henbane, hemlock, arsel, lettuce, and wild catmint, each six ounces, mix, boil well, and put into a glass vessel, stoppered. Take three spoonfuls and put into a quart of warm ale, and let the person to undergo any operation drink of this by an ounce at a time, till he falls asleep, which sleep he will continue the space of three or four hours, and all that time he will be unsensible to anything done to him.” Whether or no we have here an account of a genuine early anæsthetic we are not prepared to say.
Instances might be recorded without number of the restorative effects of ale in sickness, and more particularly in fever cases where the patient has been brought very low, and the loss of tissue has been great. Of these space only allows us to include a very few. {416}
When Pulteney, afterwards Earl of Bath, lay prostrate with pleuritic fever, the greatest physicians in the land found their skill avail nothing; and all the statesman’s alarmed friends got for expending seven hundred guineas in fees was the cold comfort that everything that could be done had been done, and the case was hopeless. Whilst those gathered round the bedside of the supposed dying man listened for his last sigh, he faintly murmured, “Small beer, small beer.” The doctors did not think it worth while to say nay, and a half-gallon cup of small beer was put to the lips of the sick man, who drained it to the dregs, and then demanded another draught, which he served in the same way: then turning on his side, he went off into a deep slumber, attended with profuse perspiration, and awoke a new man.[74] The beneficial effects of mild ale in fever is commemorated in an old poem, Small Beer:—