Shakespeare recognizes both epilepsy and rheumatism as entities apart from cramp. Epilepsy he seems to associate more with falling than with convulsion: thus, of the fit that attacked Caesar when the crown was offered to him, he writes: _Casca._ He fell down in the market-place, and foamed at mouth, and was speechless. _Brutus._ ‘Tis very like: he hath the falling-sickness.[260] ‘Cramp’ is used by Shakespeare for muscular spasms or contractures, and he links the term on the one side to rheumatism, and on the other to convulsions, in the following passages: For this, be sure, to-night thou shalt have cramps, Side-stitches that shall pen thy breath up.[261] Parolles says: ‘In a retreat he outruns any lackey: marry, in coming on he has the cramp.’[262] Prospero says: Go, charge my goblins that they grind their joints With dry convulsions; shorten up their sinews With aged cramps.[263] and ‘Leander ... went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont, and being taken with the cramp was drowned.’[264] Robert Bayford, in his _Enchiridion Medicum_ published in 1655, includes both wry-neck and convulsions under the heading cramp, but he treats epilepsy separately on the ground that, as we know to be the case, it is not always associated with convulsions. He has no word ‘rheumatism’ at all. Pepys (1664) carried about with him a hare’s foot as a charm against _colic_, i.e. against muscular spasm. Among Indians, Norwegians, and Central Africans, the foot of an elk was a charm against epilepsy. Pepys also recites a charm against cramp: Cramp, be thou faintless As our Lady was sinless When she bare Jesus. In this charm the word cramp seems to refer to the painful _muscular spasms_ of labour. Pepys, as we know, suffered from colic, but not from epilepsy, so in using a hare’s foot as a charm against colic he was probably employing a charm against epilepsy. In like manner the ‘rheumatic ring’ of to-day seems to be the lineal descendant of the cramp-ring of aforetime, and the confusion of nomenclature has doubtless not affected its efficacy. Folk-medicine serves rather to confirm than to elucidate the confusion, for in Suffolk moles’ feet are carried as a charm against rheumatism, but in Sussex against cramp. In Devonshire a dried frog is worn as a cure for fits. Boswell, in his description of Johnson at the time of their tour to the Hebrides, uses the word ‘cramp’ in its earlier significance. ‘His head,’ he says, ‘and sometimes also his body, shook with a kind of motion like the effect of a palsy: he appeared to be frequently disturbed by cramps, or convulsive contractions, of the nature of that distemper called St. Vitus’s dance.’