Anciently, says Mr. Singer, “a superstitious belief was annexed to the accident of bleeding at the nose;” hence, in the “Merchant of Venice” (ii. 5), Launcelot says: “It was not for nothing that my nose fell a-bleeding on Black Monday last.” In days gone by, it was customary with our forefathers to be bled periodically, in spring and in autumn, in allusion to which custom King Richard refers (“Richard II.,” i. 1), when he says to his uncle:
“Our doctors say this is no month to bleed.”
Hence the almanacs of the time generally gave particular seasons as the most beneficial for bleeding. The forty-seventh aphorism of Hippocrates (sect. 6) is, that “persons who are benefited by venesection or purging should be bled or purged in the spring.”
Blindness. The exact meaning of the term “sand-blind,” which occurs in the “Merchant of Venice” (ii. 2), is somewhat obscure:
“Launcelot. O heavens, this is my true-begotten father! who, being more than sand-blind, high gravel blind, knows me not.
********
Gobbo. Alack, sir, I am sand-blind, I know you not.”
It probably means very dim-sighted,[591] and in Nares’s “Glossary”[592] it is thus explained: “Having an imperfect sight, as if there was sand in the eye.” The expression is used by Beaumont and Fletcher in “Love’s Cure” (ii. 1): “Why, signors, and my honest neighbours, will you impute that as a neglect of my friends, which is an imperfection in me? I have been sand-blind from my infancy.” The term was probably one in vulgar use.[593]
Blister. In the following passage of “Timon of Athens” (v. 1), Timon appears to refer to the old superstition that a lie produces a blister on the tongue, though, in the malice of his rage, he imprecates the minor punishment on truth, and the old surgery of cauterization on falsehood:[594]
“Thou sun, that comfort’st, burn!—Speak, and be hang’d;
For each true word, a blister! and each false
Be as a caut’rizing to the root o’ the tongue,
Consuming it with speaking!”