The writers and poets of mediæval romance in more than one instance allude to anæsthesia produced by drugs. Boccaccio, who wrote his “Decameron” in 1352, in the story of Dionius, alludes to a certain anæsthetic liquid of Surgeon Mazzeo della Montagna, of Salerno. “The doctor,” he says, “supposing that the patient would never be able to endure the pain without a soporific, deferred the operation until the evening, and in the meantime ordered the water to be distilled from a certain composition, which, being drunk, would throw a person asleep as long as he judged it necessary.” Boccaccio, probably, borrowed his idea from the recipe given by Nichols, a provost of the famous old school of Salerno, who published a recipe for making an anæsthetic, similar to that of Reginald Scott. In Brooke’s “Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Julietta,” printed in 1562, which supplied Shakespeare with the plot and much material for his play “Romeo and Juliet,” Friar Laurence thus speaks to Julietta: “I have learned and proved of long time the composition of a certain paste which I make of divers somniferous simples, which beated afterwards to powdere, and dronke with a quantitie of water, within a quarter of an houre after, bringeth the receiver into such a sleepe, and burieth so deeply the senses and other spirits of life that the cunningest phistian will judge the party died. “And, besides that, it hath a more marvellous effect, for the person which useth the same feeleth no kind of grief, and, according to the quantitie of the draught, the patient remaineth in a sweete sleepe; but when the operation is perfect and done, he returneth unto his first estate.” [Illustration: A SURGEON AMPUTATING A LEG From a woodcut of the XVI century] Shakespeare’s references to mandragora, poppy and other “drowsy syrups,” are too well known to need quotation; but the following allusion by Middleton, in his play called “Women beware Women!” is not without interest:-- I’ll imitate the pities of old surgeons To this lost limb, who, ere they show their art, Cast one asleep, then cut the diseased part. William Bulleyn, the author of “A Bulwark of Defence against Sickness,” who practised as a surgeon in the reign of Henry VIII, describes an anæsthetic which he directs to be prepared from the juice of a certain herb (probably mandragora) “pressed forth, and kept in a closed earthen vessel according to art, bringeth deep sleep, and casteth man into a trance, or deep terrible sleep, until he shall be cut of the stone.” [Sidenote: Allusions to anæsthesia by antient poets] The poet Marlowe thus refers to mandragora in his play “The Jew of Malta”:-- _Barabas_: I drank of poppy and cold mandrake juice, And being asleep, belike they thought me dead, And threw me o’er the walls. Du Bartas, as translated by Sylvester in 1592, makes the following allusion to anæsthesia:--