No. 35.-1887.] 



NOTES ON CEYLON. 



141 



A BELGIAN PHYSICIAN'S NOTES ON CEYLON 

 IN 1687-89. 



Translated by Donald Ferguson. 

 {Bead December 23, 1887.) 



EGIDIUS DAALMANS, whose notes on Ceylon are 

 here given for the first time in English, was a 

 Belgian physician, born at Antwerp somewhere 

 about the middle of the seventeenth century, his death 

 occurring subsequent to 1703. He was a pupil of Bontekoe, 

 and an ardent partisan of the principles and teachings of the 

 latter. According to the "Biographie Universelle Ancienne 

 et Moderne " (Paris, 1852)— 



" He travelled to the Indies, carried on his profession there 

 for some years, and collected some useful observations on the 

 diseases which prevail in those climates ; but his conduct was 

 not free from reproach ; he compounded and sold secret 

 remedies, professed specifics. An enthusiastic adherent of 

 the ridiculous hypotheses of Paracelsus, he made applications 

 to practical medicine at once useless and dangerous. He 

 pretended, for instance, that gout was produced by the 

 fermentation of the alkaline molecules of the synovia with 

 the acid molecules of the blood ; and he proposed spirits 

 of wine as the best curative agent. This erroneous doctrine 

 forms the basis of the work that Daalmans published in 



Dutch " 



Hoef er's " Nouvelle Biographie Generale " adds that — 

 "His pathology was based on the system of acids. He 

 recommended only hot remedies and those capable of 

 producing perspiration. He highly extolled the stone del 



d2 



