The idea included under the word autointoxication in our time--that is, that the human body has a tendency to produce poisons within itself, which act deleteriously on it and must be eliminated--was a favourite one during the Middle Ages. It became the custom in our time to have recourse to antiseptics or to surgical measures of various kinds for the relief and prevention of autointoxication. In the Middle Ages they thought to reduce its harmfulness at least by direct elimination, hence the use of drastic purgatives. It seems worth while remarking, however, that the employment of these did not come into general use until the close of the Middle Ages. Basil Valentine, if he really lived in the Middle Ages, and is not merely a name for a writer of the early sixteenth century, as modern historians seem inclined to think, suggested the use of antimony for the removal of the materies morbi from the body that has so much obsessed physicians for many generations. Antimony continued to be used down to the nineteenth century. It was gradually replaced by venesection, which was employed very strenuously during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in spite of the objection of such men as Morgagni, who refused to allow this mode of treatment to be used on him. Venesection was succeeded by large doses of calomel, and the calomel era continued on almost to our own generation. As a rule, however, the medieval physicians trusted nature much more than did their colleagues of modern history--that is, after the Renaissance until the present epoch of medical science began. It has always been difficult, however, for physicians to continue long in the persuasion that nature is a helpful auxiliary, and not a hampering factor to be combated. It is all the more to the credit of the medieval physicians to find, then, that in spite of many absurdities they continued for all the later centuries of the Middle Ages to extol the value of the natural means of cure.