Pleurisy. This denotes a plethora, or redundancy of blood, and was so used, probably, from an erroneous idea that the word was derived from plus pluris. It is employed by Shakespeare in “Hamlet” (iv. 7):
“For goodness, growing to a plurisy,
Dies in his own too-much.”
In the “Two Noble Kinsmen” (v. 1) there is a similar phrase:
“that heal’st with blood
The earth when it is sick, and cur’st the world
O’ the plurisy of people.”
The word is frequently used by writers contemporary with Shakespeare. Thus, for instance, Massinger, in “The Picture” (iv. 2), says:
“A plurisy of ill blood you must let out
By labour.”
Mummy. This was a preparation for magical purposes, made from dead bodies, and was used as a medicine both long before and long after Shakespeare’s day. Its virtues seem to have been chiefly imaginary, and even the traffic in it fraudulent.[617] The preparation of mummy is said to have been first brought into use in medicine by a Jewish physician, who wrote that flesh thus embalmed was good for the cure of divers diseases, and particularly bruises, to prevent the blood’s gathering and coagulating. It has, however, long been known that no use whatever can be derived from it in medicine, and “that all which is sold in the shops, whether brought from Venice or Lyons, or even directly from the Levant by Alexandria, is factitious, the work of certain Jews, who counterfeit it by drying carcasses in ovens, after having prepared them with powder of myrrh, caballine aloes, Jewish pitch, and other coarse or unwholesome drugs.”[618] Shakespeare speaks of this preparation. Thus Othello (iii. 4), referring to the handkerchief which he had given to Desdemona, relates how:
“it was dyed in mummy which the skilful
Conserv’d of maidens’ hearts.”
And, in “Macbeth” (iv. 1), the “witches’ mummy” forms one of the ingredients of the boiling caldron. Webster, in “The White Devil” (1857, p. 5), speaks of it:
“Your followers
Have swallow’d you like mummia, and, being sick,
With such unnatural and horrid physic,
Vomit you up i’ the kennel.”