nothynge, for in his howse he neuer spente past two souses of Parys in a day, but wolde eate and drinke in other mennes howses, where as he myght get it. _With this rodde lyghtly all physicyons are beaten._"[19] [19] Froissart's Chronicles, translated by John Bouchier, Lord Berners. The humane advice given by Guyllym countenances the tradition that cards were invented for the amusement of his royal patient. CHAPTER XII. BLEEDING. Fashion, capricious everywhere, is especially so in surgery and medicine. Smoking we are now taught to regard as a pernicious practice, to be abhorred as James the First abhorred it. Yet Dr. Archer, and Dr. Everard in his "Panacea, or a Universal Medicine, being a discovery of the wonderful virtues of Tobacco" (1659), warmly defended the habit, and for long it was held by the highest authorities to be an efficacious preservative against disease. What would schoolboys now say to being flogged for _not_ smoking? Yet Thomas Hearne, in his diary (1720-21) writes--"Jan. 21, I have been told that in the last great plague in London none that kept tobacconists' shops had the plague. It is certain that smoking was looked upon as a most excellent preservative. In so much, that even children were obliged to smoak. And I remember that I heard formerly Tom Rogers, who was yeoman beadle, say, that when he was that year, when the plague raged, a school-boy at Eton, all the boys of that school were obliged to smoak in the school every morning, and that he was never whipped so much in his life as he was one morning for not smoaking." Blood-letting, so long a popular remedy with physicians, has, like tobacco-smoking for medicinal purposes, fallen into disuse and contempt. From Hippocrates to Paracelsus, who, with characteristic daring, raised some objections to the practice of venesection, doctors were in the habit of drawing disease from the body as vintners extract claret from a cask, in a ruddy stream. In the feudal ages bleeding was in high favour. Most of the abbeys had a "flebotomaria" or "bleeding-house," in which the sacred inmates underwent bleedings (or "minutions" as they were termed) at stated periods of the year, to the strains of psalmody. The brethren of the order of St. Victor underwent five munitions annually--in September, before Advent, before Lent, after Easter, and at Pentecost. There is a good general view of the superstitions and customs connected with venesection, in "The Salerne Schoole," a poem of which mention continually occurs in the writings of our old physicians. The poem commences with the following stanza:--