Laf. He was excellent, indeed, madam; the king very lately spoke of him admiringly and mourningly; he was skilful enough to have lived still, if knowledge could be set up against mortality.
Ber. What is it, my good lord, the king languishes of?
Laf. A fistula, my lord.”
The account given of Helena’s secret remedy and the king’s reason for rejecting it give, says Dr. Bucknill, an excellent idea of the state of opinion with regard to the practice of physic in Shakespeare’s time.
Fit. Formerly the term “rapture” was synonymous with a fit or trance. The word is used by Brutus in “Coriolanus” (ii. 1):
“your prattling nurse
Into a rapture lets her baby cry
While she chats him.”
Steevens quotes from the “Hospital for London’s Follies” (1602), where Gossip Luce says: “Your darling will weep itself into a rapture, if you take not good heed.”[606]
Gold. It was a long-prevailing opinion that a solution of gold had great medicinal virtues, and that the incorruptibility of the metal might be communicated to a body impregnated with it. Thus, in “2 Henry IV.” (iv. 4), Prince Henry, in the course of his address to his father, says:
“Coming to look on you, thinking you dead,
And dead almost, my liege, to think you were,
I spake unto this crown, as having sense,
And thus upbraided it: ‘The care on thee depending
Hath fed upon the body of my father;
Therefore, thou, best of gold, art worst of gold;
Other, less fine in carat, is more precious,
Preserving life in medicine potable.’”
Potable gold was one of the panaceas of ancient quacks. In John Wight’s translation of the “Secretes of Alexis” is a receipt “to dissolve and reducte golde into a potable licour, which conserveth the youth and healthe of a man, and will heale every disease that is thought incurable, in the space of seven daies at the furthest.” The receipt, however, is a highly complicated one, the gold being acted upon by juice of lemons, honey, common salt, and aqua vitæ, and distillation frequently repeated from a “urinall of glass”—as the oftener it is distilled the better it is. “Thus doyng,” it is said, “ye shall have a right naturall, and perfecte potable golde, whereof somewhat taken alone every monthe once or twice, or at least with the said licour, whereof we have spoken in the second chapter of this boke, is very excellent to preserve a man’s youthe and healthe, and to heale in a fewe daies any disease rooted in a man, and thought incurable. The said golde will also be good and profitable for diverse other operations and effectes: as good wittes and diligent searchers of the secretes of nature may easily judge.” A further allusion to gold as a medicine is probably made in “All’s Well that Ends Well” (v. 3), where the King says to Bertram: