Yet you must observe a difference between medicines drying, making thick, hardening, and congealing, of which differences, a few words will not do amiss.
1. Such medicines are said to dry, which draw out, or drink up the moisture, as a spunge drinks up water.
2. Such medicines are said to make thick, as do not consume the moisture, but add dryness to it, as you make syrups into a thick electuary by adding powders to them.
3. Such as congeal, neither draw out the moisture, nor make it thick by adding dryness to it, but contract it by vehement cold, as water is frozen into ice.
4. Hardness differs from all these, for the parts of the body swell, and are filled with flegmatic humours, or melancholy blood, which at last grows hard.
That you may clearly understand this, observe but these two things.
- 1. What it is which worketh.
- 2. What it worketh upon.
That which worketh is outwardly cold. That which is wrought upon, is a certain thickness and dryness, of humours, for if the humour were fluid as water is, it might properly be said to be congealed by cold, but not so properly hardened. Thus you see cold and dryness to be the cause of hardening. This hardening being so far from being useful, that it is obnoxious to the body of man. I pass it without more words. I suppose when Galen wrote of hardening medicines, he intended such as make thick, and therefore amongst them he reckons up Fleawort, Purslain, Houseleek, and the like, which assuage the heat of the humours in swellings, and stops subtil and sharp defluxions upon the lungs; but of these more anon.
