Selection of a few details from two or three specimen chapters will further illustrate the nature of the contents. For toothache is recommended touching the ailing tooth with one from a corpse, holding in the mouth violets cooked in wine, holding a grain of opium between the teeth. Other remedies are vinegar in which a root of jusquiam has been boiled, deer horn burnt until it whitens and dries, and a powder made from dogs’ teeth. Cavities may be filled with the brain of a partridge or crow’s dung. The latter “breaks the tooth and removes pain.” A tooth may be easily extracted by touching it with dog’s milk or applying a hot root of jusquiam to its roots. But in the latter case beware not to touch the other teeth or they will fall out too.[1636] These remedies are, however, mild indeed compared to the treatment for toothache prescribed by Pliny in two chapters of his Natural History.[1637] Nor do I find in those chapters a passage ascribed to Pliny in the Thesaurus pauperum, in which one is directed to dig a root without use of iron, touch the ailing tooth with it for three days, and then replace it where one has dug it, after which “that tooth will never ache again.”
Prescriptions for epilepsy.
For epilepsy besides parts of animals and suspensions already mentioned, “Experimenter says and I have heard from experts that eating a wolf’s heart cures.”[1638] Or one may try the following experiment: Take a frog and split him down the back with a knife, and extract his liver and wrap it up in a cabbage leaf, and reduce it to a powder in a sealed pot, and give it to the epileptic to drink with the best wine. “And if one frog does not cure him, give him another, and so on until he is cured; and don’t doubt concerning the cure, for he will be cured beyond a doubt.”[1639] From Constantinus and Walter[1640] is repeated the cure of an epileptic child by bringing him to church on certain days and having him hear mass and having the priest read over him the Scripture about this sort of demon not being cast out except by fasting and prayer. Most of the manuscripts also state that one who carries with him the names of the three kings who adored Christ will be free from epilepsy, and some give their names, Jasper, Baltaser, Melchior.[1641]
Against sorcerers and demons.
Under the caption of remedies for witchcraft and possession by demons are found such procedures as smearing the walls of the house with the blood of a black dog or burying a reed filled with quicksilver under the threshold. A recipe to rescue a patient from infatuation in love produced by sorcery is hardly translateable, but affords too good an example of sympathetic magic or of human psychology to be omitted entirely. “Si quis ad aliquam vel aliquem nimis amandum maleficiatus fuerit, tum stercus recens illius quem vel quam diligit ponatur in ocrea vel in calceo dextro amantis, et calciet se et quamprimum foetorem sentiat, maleficium solvetur.” It is also stated that wearing the heart of a vulture makes one popular with all men and very wealthy, and that by vivisecting the bird hoopoe and eating its still palpitating heart one may learn the future and all secrets concealed in men’s minds.[1642]
De morbis oculorum.
Very similar to the remedies of the Thesaurus pauperum are those in Peter’s treatise on diseases of the eyes.[1643] The works are further alike in being compilations and yet experimental or empirical. Peter states that he has collected his material on eye diseases from many books at the urging of a disciple,[1644] and that it is based upon reason and experience. Of one recipe for removing ingrowing eyebrows he says, “I have tested this with my own hands”; and he cites as an experiment of Rasis the trite prescription of using the blood of a bat to prevent eyebrows or lashes which have been plucked out from growing again.[1645] Millot-Carpentier[1646] has already given a number of these eye-cures, bringing out chiefly the great use of parts of animals, which we have already remarked in the case of Gilbert of England. We may further note a bit of astrology. Peter first makes the general assertion that the human body is subject to the planets and signs,[1647] and later in describing the eye notes that it has seven tunics or humors covering it like the seven planets. There is also, as in the Thesaurus pauperum, some use of Christian incantations. To remove a fistula from the eye, besides using the blood from a cock’s crest and pulverized snakeskin one should bind the leaf of an herb about the patient’s foot and say, “As Christ descended from heaven into the Virgin’s womb, so may the fistula descend from the eye to the foot.”[1648] This is of course also an example of the magic transfer of disease.
Summa de conservanda sanitate.
A third treatise exists under Peter’s name in a British Museum manuscript and is called a “Summa concerning the preservation of health and those things which assist and harm it.”[1649] This work opens in a more self-confident and flamboyant style than the other treatises where Peter spoke of himself in a self-depreciatory manner. Now after a few lines of pious introduction we read, “Let the Jews blush, the Saracens be put to confusion, roving practitioners desist, old enchantresses be dumb, and empirics and methodics keep silence. Let rational physicians rejoice and those descendants of the medical art who employ both reason and experience. I, master Petrus Hispanus, a native of Compostella, have pursued my education (expertus ... alumpniam) in all Italy, Burgundy, Vienne, Provence, Gascony, and certain parts of Spain. Certain useful natural phenomena which are not found in the bosom of the art of medicine I have discovered by labor, vision, chance, experience, and genius to be both useful against diseases and the causes of diseases; and I have demonstrated certain instructive experiments for conserving the safety of the human mechanism, and I have experienced that all things from the eighth sphere to the earth’s center are governed by the law of reason (veridica ratione habentur).” At first, however, the treatise consists of general rules and precepts for guarding one’s health rather than experiments or recipes. Astrology comes in again in the statement that the motion of the superior bodies is one of the causes of the shortening of human life. Presently the author considers different parts of the body in turn, as the brain, eyes, ears, teeth, lungs, heart, stomach, liver, spleen, and feet, and lists things which are good and bad for each. Things which harm the brain,[1650] for example, are quicksilver, the cerebellum of all animals except the dog and the fox, fetid odors, gluttony and drunkenness, sleeping immediately after eating—if the brain is weak, bathing after eating, turbid air, worry over temporal affairs, eating with bent head, and eating a great deal of fish or milk, cheese, unripe fruit, and nuts. Among things beneficial for the eyes frequent washing of the feet is suggested.
A Marvelous Treatise on Waters.