388 
THE COMPLETE HERBAL 
even now) then hardening medicines must 
needs be cold and dry, because they are 
contrary to them. 
The universal course of nature will prove 
it, for dryness and moisture are passive 
qualities, neither can extremeties consist in 
moisture as you may know, if you do but 
consider that dryness is not attributed to 
the air, nor water, but to the fire, and earth. 
2. The thing to be congealed must needs 
be moist, therefore the medicine congealing 
must of necessity be dry, for if cold be 
joined with dryness, it contracts the pores, 
that so the humours cannot be scattered. 
Yet you must observe a difference be- 
tween medicines drying, making thick, 
hardening, and congealing, of which dif- 
ferences, a few words will not do amiss. 
1. Such medicines are said to dry, which 
draw out, or drink up the moisture, as a 
spunge drinks up water. 
2. Such medicines are said to make thick, 
as do not consume the moisture, but add 
dryness to it, as you make syrups into a 
thick electuary by adding powders to them. 
8. Such as congeal, neither draw out the 
moisture, nor make it thick by adding dry- 
ness to it, but contract it by vehement cold, 
as water is frozen into ice. 
4. Hardness differs from all these, for 
the parts of the body swell, and are filled 
with flegmatic humours, or melancholy 
blood, which at last grows hard. 
That you may clearly understand this, 
observe but these two things. 
1. What it is which worketh. 
2. What it worketh upon. 
That which worketh is outwardly cold. 
That which is wrought upon, is a certain 
thickness and dryness, of humours, for if 
the humour were fluid as water is, it might 
properly be said to be congealed by cold, 
but not so properly hardened. Thus you 
_ see cold and dryness to be the cause of 
_ hardening. This hardening being so far 
from being useful, that it is obnoxious to 
the body of man. I pass it without more 
words. I suppose when Galen wrote of 
hardening medicines, he intended such as 
i 
make thick, and therefore amongst them he — 
reckons up Fleawort, Purslain, Houseleek, 
and the like, which assuage the heat of the | 
humours in swellings, and stops subtil and © 
sharp defluxions upon the lungs; but of © 
these more anon. 
EE 
CHAPTER III. 
Of Loosening Medicines. 
By loosening here, I do not mean purg- 
ing, nor that which is opposite to astrin- 
gency ; but that which is opposite to stretch- 
ing: I knew not suddenly what fitter Eng- 
lish name to give it, than loosening or laxa- 
tion, which latter is scarce English. 
The members are distended or stretched 
divers ways, and ought to be loosened by as 
many, for they are stretched sometimes by 
dryness, sometimes by cold, sometimes by 
repletion or fullness, sometimes by swell- 
ings, and sometimes by some of these joined 
together. I avoid terms of art as much as 
I can, because it would profit my country 
but little, to give them the rules of physic 
in such English as they understand not. 
I confess the opinion of ancient physi- 
cians hath been various about these loosen- 
ing medicines. Galen’s opinion was, that 
they might be referred either to moistening, 
or heating, or mollifying, or evacuating 
medicines, and therefore ought not to be 
referred to a chapter by themselves. 
It is likely they may, and so may all other — 
medicines be referred to heat, or coldness, 
or dryness, or moisture: but we speak not — 
here of the particular properties of medi- 
cines, but of their joined properties, as they — 
heat and moisten. 
_ Others, they question how they can be © 
distinguished from such as mollify, seeing — 
such as are loosening, and such as are emo- — 
ee en ere 
