Lives of British physicians / [Anon].

  • William Macmichael
Date:
1830
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lives of British physicians / [Anon]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    unknown to any other age or nation, which oc- casioned the sudden death of great multitudes. Caius describes it, as it appeared for the last time among us. The treatment of it is perhaps the most interesting, at least affords us the most amusing particulars. It turns upon the sole idea of promoting the sweat, and Caius lays down the strictest rules for avoiding anything that might expose the patient to the least cold, or check this salutary and critical evacuation. On this point he is peremptory. “ If two be taken in one bed, let them so continue, although it be to their unquiet- ness ; for fear whereof, and for the more quietness and safety, very good it is, during all the sweating time, that two persons lie not in one bed*.” To promote perspiration they are ordered to drink posset ale, made of sweet milk, turned with vine- gar, in a quart whereof parsley and sage, of each half one little handfull, hath been sodden, &c. * The manners and mode of life of our ancestors, as may be in- ferred from this precept, were probably nearly the same at this time as they were described by Erasmus about thirty years before; the condition of which may be supposed to have contributed to deter him from accepting the splendid offers of Henry VI11. and Cardinal Wolsey, made to induce that great scholar to fix his residence in England. “A magnificent apartment, a yearly pension of six hun- dred florins, and a benefice that produced yearly one hundred marks, were not sufficient to counterbalance the disgust he felt at the in- commodious and bad exposition of the houses, the filthiness of the streets, and the sluttishness within doors. The floors,” continues Erasmus in his Letters, “ are commonly of clay, strewed with rushes, under which lie unmolested an ancient collection of lees, grease, fragments, bones, spittle, excrements of dogs and cats, and every thing that is nasty.’’ To such a sordid and uncleanly mode of life, Erasmus was disposed to impute the frequent visits of the plague in England; and there can be no question that it would also mainly contribute to the spread and devastation of the epide- mic sickness described by Caius. C
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