Do you suffer from toothache? Then you must have omitted to rub your teeth once a year in the brains of a dog-fish, boiled in oil and kept for the purpose!
If, however, this and other remedies disappoint you, Dioscorides[716] and Celsus[717] come to your aid with the sting of the pastinaca, which, applied with hellebore or resin, extracts the teeth painlessly! As a dead certainty, if the ichthyic kingdom fail to give relief, “attach two frogs to the exterior of your jaw”!
Health, perfect health, should be the lot of every woman who follows the Plinian precepts in Book XXXII. 46.
Is she helpless from hysteria? “Lint, greased with a dolphin’s fat, and then ignited,” produces an anti-excitant; or, if the case yield not to treatment instantly, “the flesh of the strombus, left to putrefy in vinegar” is an excellent alternative!
If an easy delivery be desired, “first”—the prescription smacks of Mrs. Glasse—“catch your torpedo-fish at the time that the moon is in Libra, keep it in the open air for three days,” and then, as soon as it is introduced into the patient’s room, the trick is done! Pregnancy, on the other hand, proves often abortive, if the woman “happens to step over castoreum or over the beaver itself,” or misuses a Remora.
For dyeing the hair black calcined echineis with lard, or horse-leeches boiled in vinegar, are cheap and trustworthy recipes. For depilatories your choice is wide. The blood, gall, and liver of the Tunny, fresh or pickled; or merely the liver, pounded, but preserved with cedar-resin in a leaden box[718]; the Pulmo marinus, the Sea-hare, according to Dioscorides (De mat. med., ii. 20), the Scolopendra (ibid., ii. 16); or “the brains of the Torpedo applied with alum on the sixteenth day of the moon!”
Two more panaceas—needful and desirable now, as then—and I move to pastures new, or rather contiguous. The first: a mixture “of a live frog in a dog’s food” will, on Salpe’s authority, for ever deliver us from the yapping and barking which so often makes night hideous.
The second—naïvest and quaintest (if I may employ without cruelty these over-driven adjectives): “Democritus assures us that if the tongue be extracted from a live frog, with no part of the body adhering to it, and it is then applied—the frog must first be placed in the water(!)—to a woman while asleep, just at the spot where the heart is felt to beat, she will of a certainty answer truthfully any question put to her!”[719]
If Hippocrates blamed his predecessors for their scanty use of drugs, he would scarcely, unless suddenly clothed with a shirt of credulity, have approved of the plethora of prescriptions and panaceas prevalent in later centuries. Truly applicable would then have been the inscription suggested for a pharmacy; “Hic venditur galbanum, elaterium, opium, et omne quod in um desinit, nisi remedium.”[720]
But credulity clogged such great minds as Hippocrates and Galen. Even they included astrology in the therapeutic art, and indict practitioners who only used that “science” despitefully, or eschewed it, as “men-killers.”