Once more, in “Hamlet” (iv. 7), the King mentions the “spendthrift sigh, that hurts by easing.” Fenton, in his “Tragical Discourses” (1579), alludes to this notion in the following words: “Your scorching sighes that have already drayned your body of his wholesome humoures.”
It was also an ancient belief that sorrow consumed the blood and shortened life. Hence Romeo tells Juliet (iii. 5):
“And trust me, love, in my eye so do you:
Dry sorrow drinks our blood.”
Small-pox. Such a terrible plague was this disease in the days of our ancestors, that its name was used as an imprecation. Thus, in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2), the Princess says: “A pox of that jest.”
Saliva. The color of the spittle was, with the medical men of olden times, an important point of diagnosis. Thus, in “2 Henry IV.” (i. 2), Falstaff exclaims against fighting on a hot day, and wishes he may “never spit white again,” should it so happen.[631]
Sterility. The charm against sterility referred to by Cæsar in “Julius Cæsar” (i. 2) is copied from Plutarch, who, in his description of the festival Lupercalia, tells us how “noble young men run naked through the city, striking in sport whom they meet in the way with leather thongs,” which blows were commonly believed to have the wonderful effect attributed to them by Cæsar:
“The barren, touched in this holy chase,
Shake off their sterile curse.”
Suicide. Cominius, in “Coriolanus” (i. 9), arguing against Marcius’s overstrained modesty, refers to the manner in which suicide was thought preventable in olden times:
“If ’gainst yourself you be incens’d, we’ll put you,
Like one that means his proper harm, in manacles,
Then reason safely with you.”
Toothache. It was formerly a common superstition—and one, too, not confined to our own country—that toothache was caused by a little worm, having the form of an eel, which gradually gnawed a hole in the tooth. In “Much Ado About Nothing” (iii. 2), Shakespeare speaks of this curious belief: