But the too frequent use of it will make the woman barren and annihilate all her capability of conception.
The man who at the moment of copulation coats his member with tar[1] deprives his sperm of its generative faculty. This is the most powerful of all applications, and if a woman during her pregnancy introduces some of the substance repeatedly into her vagina, she will be sterile, and the child will be born dead.
The woman who drinks the weight of a mitskal of laurel water, with a little pepper, will cause her courses to flow again, and clear her uterus from the clots of blood which sometimes lodge there. If she makes use of this medicine when she is already pregnant, the embryo will be expelled; and taken after confinement, this medicine has the property of causing the expulsion from the matrix of all deleterious matter and of the after-birth.
The woman who drinks an infusion of coarse cinnamon[2] mixed with red myrth, and then introduces into her vagina a plug of wool saturated with the mixture, kills the foetus and provokes its expulsion, with the will of God the Highest!
If the foetus dies in the womb, a decoction of yellow wall-flowers in water will cause the expulsion of the same, with the will of God the Highest!
All the above enumerated medicines are efficacious and their effect is certain.
- ↑ The Arabs have known since a long period the vegetable tar, guetrane, and, in fact the French name for it has been derived from their language. They obtain it by distillation in rough furnaces from, the wood of the resinous trees found in their country, the pine and the cedar.
- ↑ Note in the autograph edition.—The common name of cinnamon is keurfa. Dar sini is the name of an inferior quality.
