‘Tobacco’s a physician, Good both for sound and sickly; ’Tis a hot perfume, That expels cold Rheume, And makes it flow down quickly.’ “So says an old song, in an old play, and so said Dr. Ralph Thorius, and the learned Dr. Everard, who wrote a book, entitled ‘Panacea, or a Universal Medicine, being a Discovery of the wonderful Virtues of Tobacco’ (1659); and in the frontispiece of his book, the Doctor is represented with a pipe in his mouth. Dr. William Butler, styled, by Fuller, the Æsculapius of his age, was also a great admirer of tobacco, and that he might not smoke a dry pipe, he invented a medical drink, called ‘Butler’s Ale;’ afterwards sold at the Butler’s Head, in Mason’s-alley, Basinghall-street. “Sir Theodore Mayerne gives a curious specimen of his tobacco practice: ‘A person applying to him with a violent defluxion on his teeth, Butler told him, that ‘a hard knot must be split with a hard wedge,’ and directed him to smoke tobacco without intermission, till he had consumed an ounce of the herb. The man was accustomed to smoke; he therefore took twenty-five pipes at a sitting. This first occasioned extreme sickness, and then a flux of saliva, which, with gradual abatement of the pain, ran off to the quantity of two quarts. The disorder was entirely cured, and did not return for seventeen years.’ “Ant. Wood says, that he was much resorted to, ‘and had been more, did he not delight to please himself with fantastical humours.’ “Many singular stories are related of him, perhaps they are travelling stories, as may be conjectured, from the nature of the prescription, when he ordered a lethargic parson to be put into the warm carcase of a newly-killed cow! “Fuller paints this humorist in striking colours, but observes, ‘that he made his humorsomeness to become him; wherein some of his profession have rather aped than imitated him, who had morositatem æquabilem, and kept the tenor of the same surliness to all persons.’ “The following extracts from _Letters from the Bodleian_, vol. ii., will give a notion of his _humour_, and of his mode of treating his patients. “‘Dr. Gale, of St. Paul’s schoole, assures me that a Frenchman came one time from London to Cambridge, purposely to see him, whom he made stay two houres for him in his gallery, and then he came out in an old blue gowne. The French gentleman makes him two or three very low bowes downe to the ground; Dr. Butler whippes his legge over his head, and away goes into his chamber, and did not speake with him. He kept an old mayd, whose name [p340] was Nell. Dr. Butler would many times goe to the taverne, but drinke by himselfe: about nine or ten at night, old Nell comes to him with a candle and lanthorne, and sayes, “Come home, you drunken beast.” By and by Nell would stumble, then her master calls her “drunken beast;” and so they did “drunken beast” one another all the way till they came home.’