Valentine. Without me? they cannot.
Speed. Without you? nay, that’s certain; for, without you were so simple, none else would: but you are so without these follies, that these follies are within you, and shine through you like the water in an urinal, that not an eye that sees you but is a physician to comment on your malady.”
This singular pretence, says Dr. Bucknill,[638] is “alleged to have arisen, like the barber surgery, from the ecclesiastical interdicts upon the medical vocations of the clergy. Priests and monks, being unable to visit their former patients, are said first to have resorted to the expedient of divining the malady, and directing the treatment upon simple inspection of the urine. However this may be, the practice is of very ancient date.” Numerous references to this piece of medical quackery occur in many of our old writers, most of whom condemn it in very strong terms. Thus Forestus, in his “Medical Politics,” speaks of it as being, in his opinion, a practice altogether evil, and expresses an earnest desire that medical men would combine to repress it. Shakespeare gives a further allusion to it in the passage where he makes Macbeth (v. 3) say:
“If thou couldst, doctor, cast
The water of my land, find her disease,
And purge it to a sound and pristine health,
I would applaud thee to the very echo.”
And in “2 Henry IV” (i. 2) Falstaff asks the page, “What says the doctor to my water?” and, once more, in “Twelfth Night” (iii. 4), Fabian, alluding to Malvolio, says, “Carry his water to the wise woman.”
It seems probable, too, that, in the “Merry Wives of Windsor” (ii. 3), the term “mock-water,” employed by the host to the French Dr. Caius, refers to the mockery of judging of diseases by the water or urine—“mock-water,” in this passage, being equivalent to “you pretending water-doctor!”
FOOTNOTES:
[589] See Nares’s “Glossary,” vol. ii. p. 482; also, Brand’s “Pop. Antiq.,” 1849, vol. iii. p. 311; Henderson’s “Folk-Lore of Northern Counties,” 1879, pp. 168, 169.
[590] Aldis Wright’s “Notes to King Lear,” 1877, p. 179.
[591] Dyce’s “Glossary,” p. 381; cf. the word “Berlué, pur-blinded, made sand-blind,” Cotgrave’s “Fr. and Eng. Dict.”