CHAPTEE VI. 

 FISH IN MEDICINE. 



THOUGH fish has from the earUest ages been the 

 world's favourite food, it has also heen frequently de- 

 cried as a poor unsatisfying diet. One Greek writer ad- 

 vanced the startling position that an over-addiction to it 

 impairs vision, and another, that eating fish at all makes 

 men foolish and efiemmate,* to which notion Homer is 

 supposed to suhscribe, in not allowing any of his heroes 

 to partake of these luxuries in camp. In more modem 

 days again it has been averred, that an over-indidgence 

 in this friandise entailed upon the Jews of old their foul 

 scourge of leprosy ;t 'that the cold fleme of a fish diet 

 was in some way a sovran and sure recipe for slaying 

 the flesh,' (whence, no doubt, its early iatroduction as 

 an instrument of religious discipline into the Christian 

 church ;) that ' thin drink does so overcool the blood, 

 and making many fish meals,' that those who are ichthyo- 

 phagously disposed ' fall into a kind of male green sick- 

 ness, and when they marry get wenches ;' J and again to 

 the same purpose by another as doughty authority in his 

 way, ' that there is a curious circumstance observed to 

 happen to the animate part of the creation which draw 

 their nutriment from fish, as birds and the human race, 

 that they produce more females, while doing so, than 

 maLes.' § Viewed as a diet for the sick, some doctors, 

 like Fracastorius, prohibit them to their patients alto- 



* Aia yap to nXfidos tSiv Trap airots Ixdvav ndvTfs /SXaxajfiets etui 

 /cat p^e(TTo\ \dTn}s, 

 t Vide Le Clerc, Mason Good, etc. 

 X Shatspeaxe. § Soyer. 



