Clergymen and Doctors: Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches.Anonymous
History
Clergymen and Doctors: Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches.
Anonymous
Clergy; Medicine -- Anecdotes; Medicine -- Humor; Pastoral theology -- Anecdotes; Physicians
"Being on a journey, he set himself to improve his time by meditation;
when his mind grew intent, till at length he had such ravishing tastes
of heavenly joys, and such full assurance of his interest therein, that
he utterly lost the sight and sense of this world and all its concerns,
so that for hours he knew not where he was. At last, perceiving himself
faint through a great loss of blood from his nose, he alighted from his
horse, and sat down at a spring, where he washed and refreshed himself,
earnestly desiring, if it were the will of God, that he might then
leave the world. His spirits reviving, he finished his journey in the
same delightful frame. He passed all that night without a wink of
sleep, the joy of the Lord still overflowing him, so that he seemed an
inhabitant of the other world." It was taken by his religious friends
as a special promise of heavenly favour, that at the birth of Flavel a
pair of nightingales made their nest close to the chamber of his
mother, and welcomed him into the world with their delightful warble.
A ROYAL MEDICINE.
Even so late as the days of Queen Elizabeth, ignorance and superstition
continued prime regulating powers in the practice of physic;
accomplished as some of the physicians of the day were, it was, as Lord
Bacon has affirmed, in every department excepting those that
immediately touched their own profession. Sir William Bulleyn was not
one of the least prominent and enlightened; but some of the
prescriptions which he has left on record, attest a very deplorable
state of things, existing little more than half a century before Harvey
achieved his great discovery. Take for example this recipe for an
"_Electuarium de Gemmis._"
"Take two drachms of white perles; two little peeces of saphyre;
jacinth, corneline, emerauldes, granettes, of each an ounce; setwal,
the sweate roote doronike, the rind of pomecitron, mace, basel seede,
of each two drachms; of redde corall, amber, shaving of ivory, of each
two drachms; rootes both of white and red behen, ginger, long peper,
spicknard, folium indicum, saffron, cardamon, of each one drachm; of
troch. diarodon, lignum aloes, of each half a small handful; cinnamon,
galinga, zurubeth, which is a kind of setwal, of each one drachm and a
half; thin pieces of gold and sylver, of each half a scruple; of musk,
half a drachm. Make your electuary with honey emblici, which is the
fourth kind of mirobalans with roses, strained in equall partes, as
much as will suffice. This healeth cold diseases of ye braine, harte,
stomack. It is a medicine proved against the tremblynge of the harte,
faynting and souning, the weaknes of the stomacke, pensivenes,
solitarines. Kings and noble men have used this for their comfort. It
causeth them to be bold-spirited, the body to smell wel, and ingendreth
to the face good coloure."
A SIGNIFICANT INTERPOLATION.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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