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Updated: July 23, 2025
It is laughable to read of those days when men were drugged with pills, boluses and powders. Now our physic is in our food; and the doctor prescribes a series of articles to be eaten or avoided, as the case may be.
He was at once the physician and priest of the sick, washing down his boluses with ghostly consolation, and among the sailors went by the name of The Pelican, a fowl whose hanging pouch imparts to it a most chop-fallen, lugubrious expression.
But if the wound should turn to an obstinate ulcer, take Castile soap, gum ammoniac, gum galbanum, and extract of hemlock, each one ounce; form them into eight boluses, and administer one of them every morning and evening. To prevent cows from sucking their own milk, as some of them are apt to do, rub the teats frequently with strong rancid cheese, which will prove an effectual remedy.
He often spent long hours there alone, labelling, decanting, and doing up again; and he looked upon it not as a simple store, but as a veritable sanctuary, whence there afterwards issued, elaborated by his hands, all sorts of pills, boluses, infusions, lotions, and potions, that would bear far and wide his celebrity.
He had done according to his own artless conscience and the recipes of licensed physicians, and he looked no further, but pounded, triturated, infused, made electuaries, boluses, juleps, or whatever he termed his productions, with skill and diligence, thanking Heaven that he was spared to do so, when his contemporaries generally were getting incapable of similar efforts.
Shall's do 't? 'Nay, replied the gull, 'I pray you thereof for the love of God; for, did I but know who hath had it, I should hold myself half consoled. 'Marry, then, said Bruno, 'I am ready to go to Florence, to oblige thee, for the things aforesaid, so thou wilt give me the money. Now Calandrino had maybe forty shillings, which he gave him, and Bruno accordingly repaired to Florence to a friend of his, a druggist, of whom he bought a pound of fine ginger boluses and caused compound a couple of dogballs with fresh confect of hepatic aloes; after which he let cover these latter with sugar, like the others, and set thereon a privy mark by which he might very well know them, so he should not mistake them nor change them.
'I have a desire to hear of that same madrissah. Mahbub stuffed himself with great boluses of spiced mutton fried in fat with cabbage and golden-brown onions. 'But tell me first, altogether and truthfully, the manner of thy escape. For, O Friend of all the World, he loosed his cracking belt 'I do not think it is often that a Sahib and the son of a Sahib runs away from there. 'How should they?
And as soon as the young visitors' backs were turned, what an explosion of laughter and shouting in the garret, what a dancing around the offerings brought, what an overturning of armchairs in which they have been feigning illness, what a pouring of boluses into the fire, a fire of ashes, very artistically arranged!
We may be said to have been born with their silver spoon in our mouths; and we should be terrified if the ghost of a grain went in instead. We have done our duty from our youth up by pills, boluses, and draughts: we can lay our hand, with a clear conscience, on our stomach, and avouch that fact.
To this question, he replied, that venesection had been three times performed; that a vesicatory had been applied inter scapulas; that the patient had taken occasionally of a cathartic apozem, and between whiles, alexipharmic boluses and neutral draughts. "Neutral, indeed," said the doctor; "so neutral, that I'll be crucified if ever they declare either for the patient or the disease."
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