Oxfordshire, was treated for bronchitis in 1387, with a syrup of oxymel and squills[42]. Disorders of the intestines were pretty generally combated by starch water, alum, and the astringent _bol d’Arménie_. Senna tea was also an ingredient in the humblest medicine chest. Besides the remedies we have mentioned, cordials of cinnamon, camphor, resin, and oil of pinks, electuaries of liquorice, dried prunes, and honey of roses were constantly employed. Oxide of zinc mixed with camphor[43] was also given, but I do not know in what especial case. The hot bath and the vapour bath were highly esteemed, though less frequent, perhaps, than in the earlier Middle Ages, when hot baths were hourly cried through all the streets of Paris. Still, in the fourteenth century there was no town in any way considerable without at least one _établissement de bains_. We find in the _Registers of the Châtelet_ that a hot bath was a somewhat expensive luxury, costing several sols. The prolonged warm baths in honour at the Court of Charles VI. were a scandal to the Church, and are denounced in a famous sermon of Jacques le Grand. Besides the remedies we have quoted, it must be allowed that others more fantastic were occasionally used. Last week, at Aris, a little boy informed me that I need never suffer from migraine, for I could tie a live pigeon on my head, and let it depose its excrement on my hair: a certain remedy. He assured me also that his sister, whom the doctor from Vic had declared to be dying from congestion of the lungs, had been saved by the presence of mind of his mother: she slit up a live cat, placed half the palpitating creature on the back, half on the breast of the patient, who immediately recovered. Doubtless these medicines were known in the fourteenth century. An equally absurd but more elaborate sort were used especially at court and in the treatment of great personages. But our agricultural labourers, who thought twice before they changed their silver sou, though they may have split up a cat, were not accessible to fashionable quackery. In all the _Accounts of Bonis_, we find only two receipts that are patently unreasonable; and these are the most expensive. One of them is a powder of ground seed-pearls, the other an ointment of honey of roses, olive oil, white wax, pounded with “half an ounce of mummy.” But the cold creams and cosmetics of the present day are not always conspicuous for science; we might find nostrums as inefficacious on the shelves of Madame Georgine Champbaron. And, indeed, it may be doubted whether the most fantastic remedies of the Middle Ages were not sometimes as successful against the nervous maladies in which they were most often used, as the Lourdes water, the hypnotising-mirrors, and the various patent medicines so capriciously infallible in our century. The poor and needy, with their humble, painful, everyday disorders, knew, then as now, the virtues of friction