Dryness and thickness of humours being the cause of hardness, emolient medicines must of necessity be hot and moist; and although you may peradventure find some of them dry in the second or third degrees, yet must this dryness be tempered and qualified with heat and moisture, for reason will tell you that dry medicines make hard parts harder.
Mollifying medicines are known, 1. by their taste, 2. by their feeling.
1. In taste, they are near unto sweat, but fat and oily; they are neither sharp, nor austere, nor sour, nor salt, neither do they manifest either binding, or vehement heat, or cold to be in them.
2. In feeling you can perceive no roughness, neither do they stick to your fingers like Birdlime, for they ought to penetrate the parts to be mollified, and therefore many times if occasion be, are cutting medicines mixed with them.
CHAPTER II.
Of hardening Medicines.
Galen in Lib. 5. de Simple, Med. Facult. Cap. 10. determines hardening medicines to be cold and moist, and he brings some arguments to prove it, against which other physicians contest.
I shall not here stand to quote the dispute, only take notice, that if softening medicines be hot and moist (as we shewed even now) then hardening medicines must needs be cold and dry, because they are contrary to them.
The universal course of nature will prove it, for dryness and moisture are passive qualities, neither can extremeties consist in moisture as you may know, if you do but consider that dryness is not attributed to the air, nor water, but to the fire, and earth.
2. The thing to be congealed must needs be moist, therefore the medicine congealing must of necessity be dry, for if cold be joined with dryness, it contracts the pores, that so the humours cannot be scattered.