powdered. He also recommended a child's excrement to be distilled twice, and to use the oily distillate for fistulas, canker, and as an application for premature baldness.
Album Græcum, which was dried white dogs' turds, was regularly stocked by the apothecaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and was given in colic and dysentery, but more generally applied externally to abscesses, ulcers, and quinsies. In Robert Boyle's "Collection of Medicines," 1696, "a homely but experienced medicine for a sore throat," is said to be one drachm of album græcum made into a linctus with honey of roses.
Pigeons' dung was reputed to be so violently heating that it was almost a caustic. Applied to the soles of the feet it would draw the humours down, but Quincy remarks there was no reason for believing that it attracted the peccant humours only. Fuller prescribes a poultice containing Venice turpentine, pigeons' dung, and spiders' webs to be fastened to the wrists two hours before a fit of ague is expected, to ward it off. Pectoral drinks were much improved medicinally, especially for pleurisies, if some dung of stallions had been steeped in them.
Miscellaneous Animal Remedies.
It is not possible in a short space to exhaust this unsavory topic, but a few of the more notable applications of animals or animal derivatives may be briefly mentioned.
Pigeons were cut in half while they were alive and applied to the feet of patients. Pepys alludes two or three times to this and always as an indication that the
