"
"But these Five [Six] plants may admitt of some competitors. The
QUINQUINA--How celebrated: Immoderately, Hyperbolically celebrated!"
Of Ipecacuanha, he says,--"This is now in its reign; the most
fashionable vomit."
"I am not sorry that antimonial emetics begin to be disused."
He quotes "Mr. Lock" as recommending red poppy-water and abstinence from
flesh as often useful in children's diseases.
One of his "Capsula's" is devoted to the animalcular origin of diseases,
at the end of which he says, speaking of remedies for this supposed
source of our distempers:
"Mercury we know thee: But we are afraid thou wilt kill us too, if we
employ thee to kill them that kill us.
"And yett, for the cleansing of the small Blood Vessels, and making way
for the free circulation of the Blood and Lymph--there is nothing like
Mercurial Deobstruents."
From this we learn that mercury was already in common use, and the
subject of the same popular prejudice as in our own time.
His poetical turn shows itself here and there:
"O Nightingale, with a Thorn at thy Breast; Under the trouble of a Cough,
what can be more proper than such thoughts as these?"...
If there is pathos in this, there is bathos in his apostrophe to the
millipede, beginning "Poor sowbug!" and eulogizing the healing virtues of
that odious little beast; of which he tells us to take "half a pound,
putt 'em alive into a quart or two of wine," with saffron and other
drugs, and take two ounces twice a day.
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