276 
pliny's natural histoky. 
[Book XXYIII. 
by pretty nearly uniform testimony, and to pay more attention 
to scrupulous exactness than to copiousness of diction. 
It is highly necessary, however, to advertise the reader, that 
whereas I have already described the natures of the various 
animals, and the discoveries^ due to them respectively — for, in 
fact, they have been no less serviceable in former times in dis- 
covering remedies, than they are at the present day in provid- 
ing us with them — it is my present intention to confine myself 
to the remedial properties which are found in the animal 
world, a subject which has not been altogether lost sight of in 
the former portion of this work. These additional details 
therefore, though of a different nature, must still be read in 
connexion with those which precede. 
CHAP. 2. ^EEMEDIES DEIirVED FKOM MAN. 
We will begin then with man, and our first enquires will 
be into the resources which he provides for himself— a subject 
replete with boundless difficulties at the very outset.^ 
Epileptic patients are in the habit of drinking the blood 
even of gladiators, draughts teeming with life,^ as it were ; a 
thing that, when we see it done by the wild beasts even, upon 
the same arena, inspires us with horror at the spectacle! And 
yet these persons, forsooth, consider it a most effectual cure 
for their disease, to quaff the warm, breathing, blaod from man 
himself, and, as they apply their mouth to the wound, to draw 
forth his very life ; and this, though it is regarded as an act 
of impiety to apply the human lips to the wound even of a 
wild beast ! Others there are, again, who make the marrow^ 
of the leg-bones, and the brains of infants, the objects of their 
research ! 
Among the Greek writers, too, there are not a few who have 
enlarged upon the distinctive flavours of each one of the viscera 
and members of the human body, pursuing their researches 
to the very parings of the nails ! as though, forsooth, it could 
See B. viii. c. 97, et seq., and B. xxv. c. 89, et seq. 
See B. xxviii. c. 3. 
^ This practice is mentioned with reprobation by Gelsus and Tertullian. 
It was continued, however, in some degree through the middle ages, and 
Loais XV. was accused by his people of taking baths of infants' blood to 
repair his premature decrepitude. 
•5 In recent times, Gaettard, a French practitioner, recommended human 
marrow as an emollient liniment. 
