“O, what a time have you chose out, brave Caius,
To wear a kerchief! Would you were not sick!”
“If,” says Fuller, “this county [Cheshire] hath bred no writers in that faculty [physic], the wonder is the less, if it be true what I read, that if any here be sick, they make him a posset and tye a kerchief on his head, and if that will not mend him, then God be merciful to him.”[608]
Hysteria. This disorder, which, in Shakespeare’s day, we are told, was known as “the mother,” or Hysterica passio, was not considered peculiar to women only. It is probable that, when the poet wrote the following lines in “King Lear” (ii. 4), where he makes the king say,
“O, how this mother swells up toward my heart!
Hysterica passio! down, thou climbing sorrow,
Thy element’s below!—Where is this daughter?”
he had in view the subjoined passages from Harsnet’s “Declaration of Popish Impostures” (1603), a work which, it has been suggested,[609] “he may have consulted in order to furnish out his character of Tom of Bedlam with demoniacal gibberish.” The first occurs at p. 25: “Ma. Maynie had a spice of the hysterica passio, as it seems, from his youth; hee himselfe termes it the moother (as you may see in his confessione).” Master Richard Mainy, who was persuaded by the priests that he was possessed of the devil, deposes as follows (p. 263): “The disease I speake of was a spice of the mother, wherewith I had been troubled (as is before mentioned) before my going into Fraunce. Whether I doe rightly terme it the mother or no I know not.” Dr. Jordan, in 1603, published “A Briefe Discourse of a Disease called the Suffocation of the Mother.”
Infection. According to an old but erroneous belief, infection communicated to another left the infector free; in allusion to which Timon (“Timon of Athens,” iv. 3) says:
“I will not kiss thee; then the rot returns
To thine own lips again.”
Among other notions prevalent in days gone by was the general contagiousness of disease, to which an allusion seems to be made in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (i. 1), where Helena says:
“Sickness is catching: O, were favour so,
Yours would I catch, fair Hermia, ere I go.”
Malone considers that Shakespeare, in the following passage in “Venus and Adonis,” alludes to a practice of his day, when it was customary, in time of the plague, to strew the rooms of every house with rue and other strong-smelling herbs, to prevent infection: