Nu(j<B ChirurgiccB, 8;c, 839 



« TOBACCO. 



'Tobacco's a physician, 

 Good both for sound and sickly ; 



'Tis a hot perfume, 



That expels cold Rheumc, 

 And makes it flow down quickly.* 



** So says an old song, in an old play, and so said Dr. Ralph 

 Thorius, and the learned Dr. Everard, who wrote a book, entitled 



* Panacea, or a Universal Medicine, being a Discovery of the 

 wonderful Virtues of Tobacco' (1659) ; and in the frontispiece of 

 his book, the Doctor is represented with a pipe in his mouth. 

 Dr. William Butler, styled, by Fuller, the iEsculapius of his age, 

 was also a great admirer of tobacco, and that he might not smoke 

 a dry pipe, he invented a medical drink, called ' ]3utler's Ale ; ' 

 afterwards sold at the Butler s Head, in Mason's-alley, Basing- 

 hall-street. 



" Sir Theodore Mayerne gives a curious specimen of his 

 tobacco practice : * A person applying to him with a violent 

 defluxion on his teeth, Butler told him, that ' a hard knot must be 

 split with a hard wedge,' and directed him to smoke tobacco 

 without intermission, till he had consumed an ounce of the herb. 

 The man was accustomed to smoke ; he therefore took twenty- 

 five pipes at a sitting. This first occasioned extreme sickness, 

 and then a flux of saliva, which, with gradual abatement of the 

 pain, ran off to the quantity of two quarts. The disorder was 

 entirely cured, and did not return for seventeen years.' 



'* Ant. Wood says, that he was much resorted to, * and had 

 been more, did he not delight to please himself with fantastical 

 humours.' 



" Many singular stories are related of him, perhaps they are 

 travelling stories, as may be conjectured, from the nature of the 

 prescription, when he ordered a lethargic parson to be put into 

 the warm carcase of a newly-killed cow ! 



" Fuller paints this humorist in striking colours, but observes, 



* that he made his humorsomeness to become him ; wherein some 

 of his profession have rather aped than imitated him, who had 

 morositatem aequabilem, and kept the tenor of the same surliness 

 to all persons.* 



" The following extracts from Letters from the Bodleian, vol. ii., 

 will give a notion of his humour, and of his mode of treating his 

 patients. 



" * Dr. Gale, of St. Paul's schoole, assures mo that a Frenchman 

 came one time from London to Cambridge, purposely to see him, 

 whom he made stay two houres for him in his gallery, and then he 

 came out in an old blue gowne. The French gentleman makes 

 him two or three very low bowes downe to the ground ; Dr. Butler 

 whippes his legge over his head, and away goes into his chamber, 

 and did not speake with him. He kept an old mayd, whose name 



