Chapter 18

“Thou sun, that comfort’st, burn!—Speak, and be hang’d;For each true word, a blister! and each falseBe as a caut’rizing to the root o’ the tongue,Consuming it with speaking!”

We may also compare the passage in “Winter’s Tale” (ii. 2), where Paulina declares:

“If I prove honey-mouth’d, let my tongue blister,And never to my red-look’d anger beThe trumpet any more.”[595]

Bone-ache.This was a nickname, in bygone years, for theLues venerea, an allusion to which we find in “Troilus and Cressida” (ii. 3), where Thersites speaks of “the bone-ache” as “the curse dependent on those that war for a placket.” Another name for this disease was the “brenning or burning,” a notice of which we find in “King Lear” (iv. 6).

Bruise.A favorite remedy in days past for bruises was parmaceti, a corruption of spermaceti, in allusion to which Hotspur, in “1 Henry IV.” (i. 3), speaks of it as “the sovereign’st thing on earth for an inward bruise.” So, too, in Sir T. Overbury’s “Characters,” 1616 [“An Ordinarie Fencer”]: “His wounds are seldom skin-deepe; for aninward bruise, lambstones and sweetbreads are his only spermaceti.” A well-known plant called the “Shepherd’s Purse” has been popularly nicknamed the “Poor Man’s Parmacetti,” being a joke on the Latin wordbursa, a purse, which, to a poor man, is always the best remedy for his bruises.[596]In “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 2), a plantain-leaf is pronounced to be an excellent cure “for your broken shin.” Plantain-water was a remedy in common use with the old surgeons.[597]

Bubukle.According to Johnson, this denoted “a redpimple.” Nares says it is “a corrupt word for a carbuncle, or something like;” and Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, in his “Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words,” defines it as a botch or imposthume. It occurs in “Henry V.” (iii. 6), where Fluellen describes Bardolph’s face as “all bubukles.”

Burn.The notion of one heat driving out another gave rise to the old-fashioned custom of placing a burned part near the fire to drive out the fire—a practice, says Dr. Bucknill,[598]certainly not without benefit, acting on the same principle as the application of turpentine and other stimulants to recent burns. This was one of the many instances of the ancient homœopathic doctrine, that what hurts will also cure.[599]Thus, in “King John” (iii. 1), Pandulph speaks of it:

“And falsehood falsehood cures; as fire cools fireWithin the scorched veins of one new burn’d.”

Again, in the “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (ii. 4), Proteus tells how:

“Even as one heat another heat expels,Or as one nail by strength drives out another,So the remembrance of my former loveIs by a newer object quite forgotten.”

We may also compare the words of Mowbray in “Richard II.” (i. 1), where a similar idea is contained:

“I am disgrac’d, impeach’d, and baffled here;Pierc’d to the soul with slander’s venom’d spear,The which no balm can cure, but his heart-bloodWhich breath’d this poison.”

Once more, in “Romeo and Juliet” (i. 2), Benvolio relates how

“one fire burns out another’s burning,One pain is lessen’d by another’s anguish;Turn giddy, and be holp by backward turning;One desperate grief cures with another’s languish.”

Cataract.One of the popular names for this disease of the eye was the “web and the pin.” Markham, in his “Cheapand Good Husbandry” (bk. i. chap. 37), thus describes it in horses: “But for the wart, pearle, pin, or web, which are evils grown in or upon the eye, to take them off, take the juyce of the herb betin and wash the eye therewith, it will weare the spots away.” Florio (“Ital. Dict.”) gives the following: “Cataratta is a dimnesse of sight occasioned by humores hardened in the eies, called a cataract or a pin and a web.” Shakespeare uses the term in the “Winter’s Tale” (i. 2), where Leontes speaks of

“all eyes blindWith the pin and web, but theirs;”

and in “King Lear” (iii. 4), alluding to “the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet,” says, “he gives the web and the pin.”[600]Acerbi, in his “Travels” (vol. ii. p. 290), has given the Lapland method of cure for this disease. In a fragment of an old medical treatise it is thus described: “Another sykenes ther byth ofyezen; on a webbe, a nother a wem, that hydyth the myddel of the yezen; and this hes to maners, other whilys he is white and thynne, and other whilys he is thykke, as whenne the obtalmye ne is noght clene yhelyd up, bote the rote abydyth stylle. Other whilys the webbe is noght white but rede, other blake.”[601]In the Statute of the 34 and 35 of Henry VIII. a pin and web in the eye is recited among the “customable diseases,” which honest persons, not being surgeons, might treat with herbs, roots, and waters, with the knowledge of whose nature God had endowed them.

Chilblains.These are probably alluded to by the Fool in “King Lear” (i. 5): “If a man’s brains were in’s heels, were’t not in danger of kibes?” Hamlet, too, says (v. 1): “the age is grown so picked, that the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his kibe.”

Deformity.It was an old prejudice, which is not quite extinct, that those who are defective or deformed are markedby nature as prone to mischief. Thus, in “Richard III.” (i. 3), Margaret says of Richard, Duke of Gloster:

“Thou elvish-mark’d, abortive, rooting hog!Thou that was seal’d in thy nativityThe slave of nature, and the son of hell.”

She calls himhog, in allusion to his cognizance, which was a boar. A popular expression in Shakespeare’s day for a deformed person was a “stigmatic.” It denoted any one who had beenstigmatized, or burned with an iron, as an ignominious punishment, and hence was employed to represent a person on whom nature has set a mark of deformity. Thus, in “3 Henry VI.” (ii. 2), Queen Margaret says:

“But thou art neither like thy sire, nor dam;But like a foul misshapen stigmaticMark’d by the destinies to be avoided,As venom toads, or lizards’ dreadful stings.”

Again, in “2 Henry VI.” (v. 1), young Clifford says to Richard:

“Foul stigmatic, that’s more than thou canst tell.”

We may note, too, how, in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (v. 1), mothers’ marks and congenital forms are deprecated by Oberon from the issue of the happy lovers:

“And the blots of Nature’s handShall not in their issue stand;Never mole, hare-lip, nor scar,Nor mark prodigious, such as areDespised in nativity,Shall upon their children be.”[602]

Indeed, constant allusions are to be met with in our old writers relating to this subject, showing how strong were the feelings of our forefathers on the point. But, to give one further instance of this superstition given by Shakespeare, we may quote the words of King John (iv. 2), with reference to Hubert and his supposed murder of Prince Arthur:

“A fellow by the hand of Nature mark’d,Quoted, and sign’d, to do a deed of shame,This murder had not come into my mind.”

This adaptation of the mind to the deformity of the body concurs, too, with Bacon’s theory: “Deformed persons are commonly even with nature; for, as nature hath done ill by them, so do they by nature, being void of natural affection, and so they have their revenge on nature.”

Drowning.The old superstition[603]of its being dangerous to save a person from drowning is supposed, says Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, to be alluded to in “Twelfth Night.” It was owing to the belief that the person saved would, sooner or later, injure the man who saved him. Thus, in Sir Walter Scott’s “Pirate,” Bryce, the pedler, warns the hero not to attempt to resuscitate an inanimate form which the waves had washed ashore on the mainland of Shetland. “‘Are you mad,’ exclaimed the pedler, ‘you that have lived sae lang in Zetland, to risk the saving of a drowning man? Wot ye not if ye bring him to life again he will do you some capital injury?’”

Epilepsy.A popular name for this terrible malady was the “falling-sickness,” because, when attacked with one of these fits, the patient falls suddenly to the ground. In “Julius Cæsar” (i. 2) it is thus mentioned in the following dialogue:

“Cassius.But, soft, I pray you: what, did Cæsar swoon?Casca.He fell down in the market-place, and foamed at mouth, and was speechless.Brutus.’Tis very like; he hath the falling-sickness.Cassius.No, Cæsar hath it not; but you, and I,And honest Casca, we have the falling-sickness.”

“Cassius.But, soft, I pray you: what, did Cæsar swoon?

Casca.He fell down in the market-place, and foamed at mouth, and was speechless.

Brutus.’Tis very like; he hath the falling-sickness.

Cassius.No, Cæsar hath it not; but you, and I,And honest Casca, we have the falling-sickness.”

Fistula.At the present day a fistula means an abscess external to the rectum, but in Shakespeare’s day it was used in a more general signification for a burrowing abscess inany situation.[604]The play of “All’s Well that Ends Well” has a special interest, because, as Dr. Bucknill says, its very plot may be said to be medical. “The orphan daughter of a physician cures the king of a fistula by means of a secret remedy left to her as a great treasure by her father. The royal reward is the choice of a husband among the nobles of the court, and ‘thereby hangs the tale.’” The story is taken from the tale of Gilletta of Narbonne, in the “Decameron” of Boccaccio. It came to Shakespeare through the medium of Painter’s “Palace of Pleasure,” and is to be found in the first volume, which was printed as early as 1566.[605]The story is thus introduced by Shakespeare in the following dialogue (i. 1), where the Countess of Rousillon is represented as inquiring:

“What hope is there of his majesty’s amendment?Laf.He hath abandoned his physicians, madam; under whose practices he hath persecuted time with hope; and finds no other advantage in the process but only the losing of hope by time.Count.This young gentlewoman had a father—O, that ‘had!’ how sad a passage ’tis!—whose skill was almost as great as his honesty; had it stretched so far, would have made nature immortal, and death should have play for lack of work. Would, for the king’s sake, he were living! I think it would be the death of the king’s disease.Laf.How called you the man you speak of, madam?Count.He was famous, sir, in his profession, and it was his great right to be so; Gerard de Narbon.Laf.He was excellent, indeed, madam; the king very lately spoke of him admiringly and mourningly; he was skilful enough to have lived still, if knowledge could be set up against mortality.Ber.What is it, my good lord, the king languishes of?Laf.A fistula, my lord.”

“What hope is there of his majesty’s amendment?

Laf.He hath abandoned his physicians, madam; under whose practices he hath persecuted time with hope; and finds no other advantage in the process but only the losing of hope by time.

Count.This young gentlewoman had a father—O, that ‘had!’ how sad a passage ’tis!—whose skill was almost as great as his honesty; had it stretched so far, would have made nature immortal, and death should have play for lack of work. Would, for the king’s sake, he were living! I think it would be the death of the king’s disease.

Laf.How called you the man you speak of, madam?

Count.He was famous, sir, in his profession, and it was his great right to be so; Gerard de Narbon.

Laf.He was excellent, indeed, madam; the king very lately spoke of him admiringly and mourningly; he was skilful enough to have lived still, if knowledge could be set up against mortality.

Ber.What is it, my good lord, the king languishes of?

Laf.A fistula, my lord.”

The account given of Helena’s secret remedy and the king’s reason for rejecting it give, says Dr. Bucknill, an excellent idea of the state of opinion with regard to the practice of physic in Shakespeare’s time.

Fit.Formerly the term “rapture” was synonymous with a fit or trance. The word is used by Brutus in “Coriolanus”(ii. 1):

“your prattling nurseInto a rapture lets her baby cryWhile she chats him.”

Steevens quotes from the “Hospital for London’s Follies” (1602), where Gossip Luce says: “Your darling will weep itself into a rapture, if you take not good heed.”[606]

Gold.It was a long-prevailing opinion that a solution of gold had great medicinal virtues, and that the incorruptibility of the metal might be communicated to a body impregnated with it. Thus, in “2 Henry IV.” (iv. 4), Prince Henry, in the course of his address to his father, says:

“Coming to look on you, thinking you dead,And dead almost, my liege, to think you were,I spake unto this crown, as having sense,And thus upbraided it: ‘The care on thee dependingHath fed upon the body of my father;Therefore, thou, best of gold, art worst of gold;Other, less fine in carat, is more precious,Preserving life in medicine potable.’”

Potable gold was one of the panaceas of ancient quacks. In John Wight’s translation of the “Secretes of Alexis” is a receipt “to dissolve and reducte golde into a potable licour, which conserveth the youth and healthe of a man, and will heale every disease that is thought incurable, in the space of seven daies at the furthest.” The receipt, however, is a highly complicated one, the gold being acted upon by juice of lemons, honey, common salt, andaqua vitæ, and distillation frequently repeated from a “urinall of glass”—as the oftener it is distilled the better it is. “Thus doyng,” it is said, “ye shall have a right naturall, and perfecte potable golde, whereof somewhat taken alone every monthe once or twice, or at least with the said licour, whereof we have spoken in the second chapter of this boke, is very excellent to preserve a man’s youthe and healthe, and to heale in a fewe daies any disease rooted in a man, and thought incurable.The said golde will also be good and profitable for diverse other operations and effectes: as good wittes and diligent searchers of the secretes of nature may easily judge.” A further allusion to gold as a medicine is probably made in “All’s Well that Ends Well” (v. 3), where the King says to Bertram:

“Plutus himself,That knows the tinct and multiplying medicine,Hath not in nature’s mystery more science,Than I have in this ring.”

Chaucer, too, in his sarcastic excuse for the doctor’s avarice, refers to this old belief:

“And yet he was but esy of despence:He kept that he wan in the pestilence.For gold in physic is a cordial;Therefore he loved it in special.”

Once more, in Sir Kenelm Digby’s “Receipts” (1674), we are told that the gold is to be calcined with three salts, ground with sulphur, burned in a reverberatory furnace with sulphur twelve times, then digested with spirit of wine “which will be tincted very yellow, of which, few drops for a dose in a fit vehicle hath wrought great effects.”

The term “grand liquor” is also used by Shakespeare for theaurum potabileof the alchemist, as in “Tempest” (v. 1):

“Where should theyFind this grand liquor that hath gilded them?”

Good Year.This is evidently a corruption ofgoujère, a disease derived from the Frenchgouge, a common camp-follower, and probably alludes to theMorbus Gallicus. Thus, in “King Lear” (v. 3), we read:

“The good-years shall devour them, flesh and fell,Ere they shall make us weep.”

With the corruption, however, of the spelling, the word lost in time its real meaning, and it is, consequently, found inpassages where a sense opposite to the true one is intended.[607]It was often used in exclamations, as in “Merry Wives of Windsor” (i. 4): “We must give folks leave to prate: what, the good-jear!” In “Troilus and Cressida” (v. 1), Thersites, by the “rotten diseases of the south,” probably meant theMorbus Gallicus.

Handkerchief.It was formerly a common practice in England for those who were sick to wear a kerchief on their heads, and still continues at the present day among the common people in many places. Thus, in “Julius Cæsar” (ii. 1), we find the following allusion:

“O, what a time have you chose out, brave Caius,To wear a kerchief! Would you were not sick!”

“If,” says Fuller, “this county [Cheshire] hath bred no writers in that faculty [physic], the wonder is the less, if it be true what I read, that if any here be sick, they make him a posset and tye a kerchief on his head, and if that will not mend him, then God be merciful to him.”[608]

Hysteria.This disorder, which, in Shakespeare’s day, we are told, was known as “the mother,” orHysterica passio, was not considered peculiar to women only. It is probable that, when the poet wrote the following lines in “King Lear” (ii. 4), where he makes the king say,

“O, how this mother swells up toward my heart!Hysterica passio!down, thou climbing sorrow,Thy element’s below!—Where is this daughter?”

he had in view the subjoined passages from Harsnet’s “Declaration of Popish Impostures” (1603), a work which, it has been suggested,[609]“he may have consulted in order to furnish out his character of Tom of Bedlam with demoniacal gibberish.” The first occurs at p. 25: “Ma. Maynie had a spice of thehysterica passio, as it seems, from his youth; hee himselfe termes it the moother (as you may see in his confessione).”Master Richard Mainy, who was persuaded by the priests that he was possessed of the devil, deposes as follows (p. 263): “The disease I speake of was a spice of the mother, wherewith I had been troubled (as is before mentioned) before my going into Fraunce. Whether I doe rightly terme it themotheror no I know not.” Dr. Jordan, in 1603, published “A Briefe Discourse of a Disease called the Suffocation of the Mother.”

Infection.According to an old but erroneous belief, infection communicated to another left the infector free; in allusion to which Timon (“Timon of Athens,” iv. 3) says:

“I will not kiss thee; then the rot returnsTo thine own lips again.”

Among other notions prevalent in days gone by was the general contagiousness of disease, to which an allusion seems to be made in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (i. 1), where Helena says:

“Sickness is catching: O, were favour so,Yours would I catch, fair Hermia, ere I go.”

Malone considers that Shakespeare, in the following passage in “Venus and Adonis,” alludes to a practice of his day, when it was customary, in time of the plague, to strew the rooms of every house with rue and other strong-smelling herbs, to prevent infection:

“Long may they kiss each other, for this cure!O, never let their crimson liveries wear!And as they last, their verdure still endure,To drive infection from the dangerous year!”

Again, the contagiousness of pestilence is thus alluded to by Beatrice in “Much Ado About Nothing” (i. 1): “O Lord, he will hang upon him like a disease: he is sooner caught than the pestilence, and the taker runs presently mad.” The belief, too, that the poison of pestilence dwells in the air, is spoken of in “Timon of Athens” (iv. 3):

“When JoveWill o’er some high-viced city hang his poisonIn the sick air.”

And, again, in “Richard II.” (i. 3):

“Devouring pestilence hangs in our air.”

It is alluded to, also, in “Twelfth Night” (i. 1), where the Duke says:

“O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first,Methought she purged the air of pestilence.”

While on this subject, we may quote the following dialogue from the same play (ii. 3), which, as Dr. Bucknill[610]remarks, “involves the idea that contagion is bound up with something appealing to the sense of smell, a mellifluous voice being miscalled contagious; unless one could apply one organ to the functions of another, and thus admit contagion, not through its usual portal, the nose:”

“Sir Andrew.A mellifluous voice, as I am true knight.Sir Toby.A contagious breath.Sir Andrew.Very sweet and contagious, i’ faith.Sir Toby.To hear by the nose, it is dulcet in contagion.”

“Sir Andrew.A mellifluous voice, as I am true knight.

Sir Toby.A contagious breath.

Sir Andrew.Very sweet and contagious, i’ faith.

Sir Toby.To hear by the nose, it is dulcet in contagion.”

Insanity.That is a common idea that the symptoms of madness are increased by the full moon. Shakespeare mentions this popular fallacy in “Othello” (v. 2), where he tells us that the moon makes men insane when she comes nearer the earth than she was wont.[611]

Music as a cure for madness is, perhaps, referred to in “King Lear” (iv. 7), where the physician of the king says: “Louder the music there.”[612]Mr. Singer, however, has this note: “Shakespeare considered soft music favorable to sleep. Lear, we may suppose, had been thus composed to rest; and now the physician desires louder music to be played, for the purpose of waking him.”

So, in “Richard II.” (v. 5), the king says:

“This music mads me: let it sound no more;For though it have holp madmen to their wits,In me, it seems, it will make wise men mad.”

The power of music as a medical agency has been recognized from the earliest times, and in mental cases has often been highly efficacious.[613]Referring to music as inducing sleep, we may quote the touching passage in “2 Henry IV.” (iv. 5), where the king says:

“Let there be no noise made, my gentle friends;Unless some dull and favourable handWill whisper music to my weary spirit.Warwick.Call for the music in the other room.”

“Let there be no noise made, my gentle friends;Unless some dull and favourable handWill whisper music to my weary spirit.

Warwick.Call for the music in the other room.”

Ariel, in “The Tempest” (ii. 1), enters playingsolemn musicto produce this effect.

A mad-house seems formerly to have been designated a “dark house.” Hence, in “Twelfth Night” (iii. 4), the reason for putting Malvolio into a dark room was, to make him believe that he was mad. In the following act (iv. 2) he says: “Good Sir Topas, do not think I am mad; they have laid me here in hideous darkness;” and further on (v. 1) he asks,

“Why have you suffer’d me to be imprison’d,Kept in a dark house?”

In “As You Like It” (iii. 2), Rosalind says that “Love is merely a madness, and ... deserves as well a dark-house and a whip as madmen do.”

The expression “horn-mad,”i. e., quite mad, occurs in the “Comedy of Errors” (ii. 1): “Why, mistress, sure my master is horn-mad.” And, again, in “Merry Wives of Windsor” (i. 4), Mistress Quickly says, “If he had found the young man, he would have been horn-mad.”

Madness in cattle was supposed to arise from a distemper in the internal substance of their horns, and furious or madcattle had their horns bound with straw.

King’s Evil.This was a common name in years gone by for scrofula, because the sovereigns of England were supposed to possess the power of curing it, “without other medicine, save only by handling and prayer.” This custom of “touching for the king’s evil” is alluded to in “Macbeth” (iv. 3), where the following dialogue is introduced:

“Malcolm.Comes the king forth, I pray you?Doctor.Ay, sir; there are a crew of wretched soulsThat stay his cure; their malady convincesThe great assay of art; but, at his touch—Such sanctity hath heaven given his hand——They presently amend.Malcolm.I thank you, doctor.Macduff.What’s the disease he means?Malcolm.’Tis call’d the evil:A most miraculous work in this good king;Which often, since my here-remain in England,I have seen him do. How he solicits heaven,Himself best knows: but strangely-visited people,All swoln and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye,The mere despair of surgery, he cures;Hanging a golden stamp about their necks,Put on with holy prayers: and ’tis spoken,To the succeeding royalty he leavesThe healing benediction. With this strange virtueHe hath a heavenly gift of prophecy;And sundry blessings hang about his throne,That speak him full of grace.”

“Malcolm.Comes the king forth, I pray you?

Doctor.Ay, sir; there are a crew of wretched soulsThat stay his cure; their malady convincesThe great assay of art; but, at his touch—Such sanctity hath heaven given his hand——They presently amend.

Malcolm.I thank you, doctor.

Macduff.What’s the disease he means?

Malcolm.’Tis call’d the evil:A most miraculous work in this good king;Which often, since my here-remain in England,I have seen him do. How he solicits heaven,Himself best knows: but strangely-visited people,All swoln and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye,The mere despair of surgery, he cures;Hanging a golden stamp about their necks,Put on with holy prayers: and ’tis spoken,To the succeeding royalty he leavesThe healing benediction. With this strange virtueHe hath a heavenly gift of prophecy;And sundry blessings hang about his throne,That speak him full of grace.”

This reference, which has nothing to do with the progress of the drama, is introduced, obviously, in compliment to King James, who fancied himself endowed with the Confessor’s powers.[614]The poet found authority for the passage in Holinshed (vol. i. p. 279): “As hath bin thought, he was enspired with the gift of prophecie, and also to haue hadde the gift of healing infirmities and diseases. Namely, he vsed to help those that were vexed with the disease,commonly called the kyngs euill, and left that vertue as it were a portion of inheritance vnto his successors the kyngs of this realme.” Edward’s miraculous powers were believed in, we are told, by his contemporaries, or at least soon after his death, and were expressly recognized by Pope Alexander III., who canonized him. In Plot’s “Oxfordshire” (chap. x. sec. 125) there is an account, accompanied with a drawing, of the touch-piece supposed to have been given by this monarch. James I.’s practice of touching for the evil is frequently mentioned in Nichols’s “Progresses.” Charles I., when at York, touched seventy persons in one day. Indeed, few are aware to what an extent this superstition once prevailed. In the course of twenty years, between 1660 and 1682, no less than 92,107 persons were touched for this disease. The first English monarch who refused to touch for the king’s evil was William III., but the practice was resumed by Queen Anne, who officially announced, in theLondon Gazette, March 12, 1712, her royal intention to receive patients afflicted with the malady in question. It was probably about that time that Johnson was touched by her majesty, upon the recommendation of the celebrated physician Sir John Floyer, of Lichfield. King George I. put an end to this practice, which is said to have originated with Edward the Confessor, in 1058.[615]The custom was also observed by French kings; and on Easter Sunday, 1686, Louis XIV. is said to have touched 1600 persons.

Lethargy.This is frequently confounded by medical men of former times, and by Shakespeare himself, with apoplexy. The term occurs in the list of diseases quoted by Thersites in “Troilus and Cressida” (v. 1).[616]

Leprosy.This was, in years gone by, used to denote thelues venerea, as in “Antony and Cleopatra” (iii. 8):

“Yon ribaudred nag of Egypt,—Whom leprosy o’ertake!****Hoists sails and flies.”

Leech.The old medical term for a leech is a “blood-sucker,” and a knot would be an appropriate term for a number of clustering leeches. So, in “Richard III.” (iii. 3), Grey, being led to the block, says of Richard’s minions:

“A knot you are of damned blood-suckers.”

In “2 Henry VI.” (iii. 2) mention is made by Warwick of the “blood-sucker of sleeping men,” which, says Dr. Bucknill, appears to mean the vampire-bat.

Measles.This word originally signified leprosy, although in modern times used for a very different disorder. Its derivation is the old French wordmeseau, ormesel, a leper. Thus, Cotgrave has “Meseau, a meselled, scurvy, leaporous, lazarous person.” Distempered or scurvied hogs are still said to be measled. It is in this sense that it is used in “Coriolanus” (iii. 1):

“As for my country I have shed my blood,Not fearing outward force, so shall my lungsCoin words till their decay, against those measles,Which we disdain should tetter us, yet soughtThe very way to catch them.”

Pleurisy.This denotes a plethora, or redundancy of blood, and was so used, probably, from an erroneous idea that the word was derived fromplus pluris. It is employed by Shakespeare in “Hamlet” (iv. 7):

“For goodness, growing to a plurisy,Dies in his own too-much.”

In the “Two Noble Kinsmen” (v. 1) there is a similar phrase:

“that heal’st with bloodThe earth when it is sick, and cur’st the worldO’ the plurisy of people.”

The word is frequently used by writers contemporary with Shakespeare. Thus, for instance, Massinger, in “The Picture” (iv. 2), says:

“A plurisy of ill blood you must let outBy labour.”

Mummy.This was a preparation for magical purposes, made from dead bodies, and was used as a medicine both long before and long after Shakespeare’s day. Its virtues seem to have been chiefly imaginary, and even the traffic in it fraudulent.[617]The preparation of mummy is said to have been first brought into use in medicine by a Jewish physician, who wrote that flesh thus embalmed was good for the cure of divers diseases, and particularly bruises, to prevent the blood’s gathering and coagulating. It has, however, long been known that no use whatever can be derived from it in medicine, and “that all which is sold in the shops, whether brought from Venice or Lyons, or even directly from the Levant by Alexandria, is factitious, the work of certain Jews, who counterfeit it by drying carcasses in ovens, after having prepared them with powder of myrrh, caballine aloes, Jewish pitch, and other coarse or unwholesome drugs.”[618]Shakespeare speaks of this preparation. Thus Othello (iii. 4), referring to the handkerchief which he had given to Desdemona, relates how:

“it was dyed in mummy which the skilfulConserv’d of maidens’ hearts.”

And, in “Macbeth” (iv. 1), the “witches’ mummy” forms one of the ingredients of the boiling caldron. Webster, in “The White Devil” (1857, p. 5), speaks of it:

“Your followersHave swallow’d you like mummia, and, being sick,With such unnatural and horrid physic,Vomit you up i’ the kennel.”

Sir Thomas Browne, in his interesting “Fragment on Mummies,” tells us that Francis I. always carried mummy[619]with him as a panacea against all disorders. Some used it forepilepsy, some for gout, some used it as a styptic. He further adds: “The common opinion of the virtues of mummy bred great consumption thereof, and princes and great men contended for this strange panacea, wherein Jews dealt largely, manufacturing mummies from dead carcasses, and giving them the names of kings, while specifics were compounded from crosses and gibbets leavings.”

Nightmare.There are various charms practised, in this and other countries, for the prevention of nightmare, many of which are exceedingly quaint. In days gone by it appears that St. Vitalis, whose name has been corrupted into St. Withold, was invoked; and, by way of illustration, Theobald quotes from the old play of “King John”[620]the following:

“Sweet S. Withold, of thy lenitie, defend us from extremitie.”

Shakespeare, alluding to the nightmare, in his “King Lear” (iii. 4), refers to the same saint, and gives us a curious old charm:

“Saint Withold footed thrice the old [wold];He met the night-mare, and her nine-fold;Bid her alightAnd her troth plight,And, aroint thee, witch, aroint thee!”

For what purpose, as Mr. Singer[621]has pointed out, the incubus is enjoined to “plight her troth,” will appear from a charm against the nightmare, in Reginald Scot’s “Discovery of Witchcraft,” which occurs, with slight variation, in Fletcher’s “Monsieur Thomas” (iv. 6):

“St. George, St. George, our lady’s knight,He walks by day, so does he by night,And when he had her found,He her beat and her bound,Until to him her troth she plight,She would not stir from him that night.”

Paralysis.An old term for chronic paralysis was “coldpalsies,” which is used by Thersites in “Troilus and Cressida” (v. 1).[622]

Philosopher’s Stone.This was supposed, by its touch, to convert base metal into gold. It is noticed by Shakespeare in “Antony and Cleopatra” (i. 5):

“Alexas.Sovereign of Egypt, hail!Cleopatra.How much unlike art thou Mark Antony!Yet, coming from him, that great medicine hathWith his tinct gilded thee.”

“Alexas.Sovereign of Egypt, hail!

Cleopatra.How much unlike art thou Mark Antony!Yet, coming from him, that great medicine hathWith his tinct gilded thee.”

The alchemists call the matter, whatever it may be, says Johnson, by which they perform transmutation, a medicine. Thus, Chapman, in his “Shadow of Night” (1594): “O, then, thougreat elixirof all treasures;” on which passage he has the following note: “The philosopher’s stone, orphilosophica medicina, is called thegreat elixir.” Another reference occurs in “Timon of Athens” (ii. 2), where the Fool, in reply to the question of Varro’s Servant, “What is a whoremaster, fool?” answers, “A fool in good clothes, and something like thee. ’Tis a spirit: sometime ’t appears like a lord; sometime like a lawyer; sometime like a philosopher, with two stones moe than’s artificial one,” etc.; a passage which Johnson explains as meaning “more than the philosopher’s stone,” or twice the value of a philosopher’s stone; though, as Farmer observes, “Gower has a chapter, in his ‘Confessio Amantis,’ of the three stones that philosophers made.” Singer,[623]in his note on the philosopher’s stone, says that Sir Thomas Smith was one of those who lost considerable sums in seeking of it. Sir Richard Steele was one of the last eminent men who entertained hopes of being successful in this pursuit. His laboratory was at Poplar.[624]

Pimple.In the Midland Counties, a common name for a pimple, which, by rubbing, is made to smart, orrubbed to sense, is “a quat.” The word occurs in “Othello” (v. 1),where Roderigo is so called by Iago:

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