drawing-plaisters

Updated: July 14, 2026

The pain of the swelling was in particular very violent, and to some intolerable; the physicians and surgeons may be said to have tortured many poor creatures even to death. The swellings in some grew hard, and they applied violent drawing-plaisters or poultices to break them, and if these did not do they cut and scarified them in a terrible manner.

Daniel Defoe - A Journal of the Plague Year, written by a citizen who continued all the while in London