37*2 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO 17 J 8. 



from thence would be entirely stopped; and this was all they expected from 

 their medicines, as they were entirely unacquainted with the nature of the dis- 

 temper, and did not in the least imagine, but if the symptoms that first attacked 

 the part were removed, the patient was entirely cured. 



I shall now, as a further confirmation of what I have advanced, proceed to 

 prove, that by this brenning or burning, is meant the venereal disease, by de- 

 monstrating that succeeding historians, physical and surgical writers, and others, 

 have all along with us in England used the very same word to signify the vene- 

 real malady. In an old manuscript I have by me, written about the year ISQO, 

 is a receipt for brenning of the pyntyl, yat men ckpe ye apegalle; galle being an 

 old English word for a running sore. They who know the etymology of the 

 word apron, cannot be ignorant of this. And in another manuscript, written 

 about 50 years after, is a receipt for burning in that part by a woman. Simon 

 Fish, a zealous promoter of the Reformation in the reign of Henry the 8th, in 

 his supplication of beggars, presented to the king in 1530, says as follows, 

 these be they (speaking of the Romish priests) that corrupt the whole genera- 

 tion of mankind in your realm, that catch the pockes of one woman and bear 

 them to another; that be burnt with one woman and bare it to another; that 

 catch the lepry of one woman and bare it unto another. But to make this 

 matter still more evident, Andrew Boord, a Doctor in Physic, and Romish 

 priest, in the reign of Henry the 8th, in a book, entitled The Breviary of 

 Health, printed in 1546, speaks very particularly of this sort of burning. One 

 of his chapters begins thus, the Jpth chapiter doth shew of burning of an 

 harlotte ; where his notion, of communicating the burning is very particular. 

 The same author adds, that if a man be burnt with an harlot, and do meddle 

 with another woman within a day, he shall burn the woman that he shall meddle 

 withal ; and as an immediate remedy against the burning, he recommends the 

 washing the pudenda two or three times with white wine, or else with sack and 

 water ; but if the matter have continued long, to go to an expert surgeon to 

 have help. In his 82d chapter, he speaks of two sorts of burning, the one by 

 fire, and the other by a woman through carnal copulation, and refers the per- 

 son that is burnt of a harlot to another chapter of his for advice, what to do, 

 yf he get a dorser or two, so called from its protuberancy or bunching out : for 

 I find about that time the word bubo was mostly made use of, to signify that 

 sort of swelling which usually happens in pestilential diseases. 



From hence it appears, that the burning, by its consequents, was venereal, 

 since every day's experience makes it evident, that the ill treatment of the first 

 symptoms of the disease, either by astringent medicines, or the removing them 

 by cooling and healing the excoriated parts, will generally be attended with such 



