120 THE MAGIC OF JEWELS AND CHARMS
coral,
if kept in the house, destroyed all evil influences, and if a woman
wore touching her skin a concretion taken from the stomach of a
she-goat that had not had young, this woman would never bear a child.3
The
curious old medical treatise in verse called the "Schola Salernitana,"
was translated into English by Sir James Harington in 1607. The
following lines give advice that is as appropriate to the conditions of
our own age as to those. of any other : 4
Use three physitians still, first doctor Quiet, Next doctor Merry-man and doctor Dyet.
Whether
with or without intention, the translator has omitted to render the
qualification given in the original: "Si tibi deficiant medici" (if
other doctors are lacking).
The
terrible plague known as the Black Death is said to have claimed
13,000,000 victims in Europe in the years 1347 and 1348. A
contemporary, Olivier de la Haye, in a poem describing this fearful
visitation, gives a number of recipes used, or to be used as remedies.
In one of these there appear as ingredients pearls, jargoons, emeralds
and coral, one-sixth of a drachm of each of these materials entering
into the composition of the prescription.5 The symptoms of this form of the plague, as described by the old writers, are said to resemble
closely those of the disease that was prevalent not long ago in some
parts of Asia, especially in northern China and Manchuria.
A famous class of medical remedies used in medieval
1
From a fourteenth century Italian MS. translation of the treatise in
the author's library; see fol. 8, recto, col. 2; fol. 9, recto, col. 1
; fol. 10, recto, col. 2; fol. 14, verso, col. 1 ; fol. 17, verso, col.
1 ; fol. 25, verso, col. 1 ; foL 26, verso, col. 1 ; fol. 26, verso,
col. 2 ; fol. 29, verso, col. 2.
'Regimen
sanitatis Salernitanum, ed. Sir Alexander Cooke, Oxford, 1830, p. 125.
This edition contains reproductions of many curious woodcuts from the
old German editions of Curio, published in 1559, 1568 and 1573.
'
Havard, " Histoire de l'orfèvrerie," Paris, 1896, p. 359; Olivier de la
Haye, " Poeme sur la grande peste de 1348," versée 3163 sqq,
