disease. He was particularly careful in the use of purgatives, which he said were apt to occasion irritation of the intestinal canal, and in dysentery he relied usually on fruits, rice, and farinaceous food, though in severe cases he ordered quicklime, arsenic, and opium. In Freind's History of Medicine (1727) a translation of some comments of Rhazes on the impostors of his day shows better than the citations already given how just and, it may be said, modern were the ideas of this practitioner of more than a thousand years ago. It may be added that Freind is not very complimentary to Rhazes generally. I append an abbreviation of this interesting notice of the quackery of the ninth century.
There are so many little arts used by mountebanks and pretenders
to physic that an entire treatise, had I mind to write one,
would not contain them. Their impudence is equal to their guilt
in tormenting persons in their last hours. Some of them profess to
cure the falling sickness (epilepsy) by making an issue at the back
of the head in form of a cross, and pretending to take something
out of the opening which they held all the time in their hands.
Others give out that they will draw snakes out of their patients'
noses; this they seem to do by putting an iron probe up the nostril
until the blood comes. Then they draw out an artificial worm,
made of liver. Other tricks are to remove white specks from the
eye, to draw water from the ear, worms from the teeth, stones
from the bladder, or phlegm from various parts of the body, always
having concealed the substance in their hands which they pretend
to extract. Another performance is to collect the evil humours of
the body into one place by rubbing that part with winter cherries
until they cause an inflammation. Then they apply some oil to
heal the place. Some assure their patients they have swallowed
glass. To prove this they tickle the throat with a feather to induce
vomiting, when some particles of glass are ejected which were put
there by the feather. No wise man ought to trust his life in their
hands, nor take any of their medicines which have proved fatal to
many.
Rhazes writes of aqua vitæ, but it is now accepted
that he only means a kind of wine. The distillation of
