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Among the older writers the Ephemerides contains an account of blue saliva; Huxham speaks of green saliva; Marcellus Donatus of yellow, and Peterman relates the history of a case of yellow saliva. Dickinson describes a woman of sixty whose saliva was blue; besides this nothing was definitely the matter with her.
Huxham, a physician of some eminence in his day, when speaking of Asclepiades, the Roman empiric, says: "This man from a declaimer turned physician, and set himself up to oppose all the physicians of his time; and the novelty of the thing bore him out, as it frequently doth the quacks of the present time; and ever will while the majority of the world are fools."
Huxham reported to the Royal Society in 1748 the history of a child which was born with a tumor near the anus larger than the whole body of the child; this tumor contained rudiments of an embryo. Young speaks of a fetus which lay encysted between the laminae of the transverse mesocolon, and Highmore published a report of a fetus in a cyst communicating with the duodenum.
Many of the older books are full of absurd nostrums. A century ago, Huxham gave messes to his patients containing more than four hundred ingredients. Remedies were ordered that must have been suggested by the imagination; things odious, abominable, unmentionable; flesh of vipers, powder of dead men's bones, and other horrors, best mused in expressive silence.
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