Peter of Spain, a native of Lisbon, was a physician who became Pope under the title of John XXI. He died in 1277. He wrote a treatise on medicine, or rather made a collection of formulas, including most of the absurd ones then current and adding a few of his own. One was to carry about a parchment on which were written the names of Gaspard, Balthasar, and Melchior, the three wise men of the East, as a sure preservative from epilepsy. Another was a method of curing a diarrhœa by filling a human bone with the excrements of a patient, and throwing it into a river. The diarrhœa would cease when the bone was emptied of its contents. HENRY VIII (OF ENGLAND) was fond of dabbling with medicine. In Brewer’s history of his reign, referring to the years 1516-18, we are told:-- “The amusements of court were diversified by hunting and out-door sports in the morning; in the afternoon by Memo’s music, by the consecration and distribution of cramp rings, or the invention of plasters and compounding of medicines, an occupation in which the King took unusual pleasure.” In the British Museum among the Sloane MSS. there is one numbered 1047, entitled Dr. Butt’s Diary, which records many of these pharmaceutical achievements of the monarch. Dr. Butt was the King’s physician and was no doubt his guide in these experiments. Dr. Butt, or Butts, is referred to in Strype’s “Life of Cranmer” and in Shakespeare’s “Henry VIII.” Many of the liniments and cataplasms formulated are for excoriations or ulcers in the legs, a disease, as Dr. Brewer notes, “common in those days, and from which the King himself suffered.” Among the contents of the Diary are “The King’s Majesty’s own Plaster.” It is described as a plaster devised by the king to heal ulcers without pain. It was a compound of pearls and guaiacum wood. There are in the manuscript formulas for other plasters “devised by the King at Greenwich and made at Westminster” to heal excoriations, to heal swellings in the ankles, one for my lady Anne of Cleves “to mollify and resolve, comfort and cease pain of cold and windy causes”; and an ointment to cool and “let” (prevent) inflammations, and take away itch. Other formulas by Dr. Butt himself, and by other contemporary doctors, are comprised in this Diary. Sir H. Halford, in an article “On the Deaths of Some Eminent Persons,” printed in 1835, says of Henry VIII, who died of dropsy at the age of 56, that he was “a great dabbler in physic, and offered medical advice on all occasions which presented themselves, and also made up the medicines.” QUEEN ELIZABETH OF ENGLAND