Introduction - Uppsala Monitoring Centre

sometimes they so trouble the brain, that the patients perform many
indecent gestures and antic tricks with their mouths and eyes, arms
and legs, like as such as are frantic; they are troubled with cold
sweats, their faces become blackish or yellowish, always ghastly, all
their bodies are benumbed, and they die in a short time unless they
be helped; poisons of this kind are hemlock, poppy,
nightshade, henbane, mandrage, mercury. Some have devised a
fourth manner of curing the Lues venerea, which is by suffitus or
fumigations. I do not much approve hereof, by reason of sundry
malign symptoms which thence arise, for they infect and corrupt by
their venimous contagion, the brain and lungs, by whom they are
primarily and fully received, whence the patients during the residue
of their lives have stinking breaths. Yea many while they have been
thus handled, have been taken hold of by a convulsion, and a
trembling of their heads, hands, & legs, with a deafness, apoplexy,
and lastly miserable death, by reason of the malign vapours of
sulphur and quicksilver, whereof cinnabaris (sulphide of mercury)
consists, drawn in by their mouth, nose, and all the rest of the body.’
1595 Henry Lyte’s Herbal. ‘New herbal, or history of plants wherein is
contained the whole discourse and perfect description of all sorts of
herbs and plants: their divers and sundry kinds: their names, natures,
operations, & vertues: and that not only of those which are here
growing in this our country of England but of all others also of foreign
realms commonly used in physick. First set forth in the Dutch or
Almaigne (German) tongue, by that learned D. Rembert Dodens,
physcian to the Emperor: and now first translated out of French into
English, by Henry Lyte Esquire (1529–1607).’
Henbane ‘It is so hurtful and venimous that such as only sleep
under the shadow thereof become sick and sometimes die.’ In 1578
he published his ‘Niewe Herball’, a translation from the work of the
Flemish herbalist, Dodoens, and dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I.
The book, which became known as ‘Lyte’s Herbal’, was a best seller
and was still being reprinted in 1678.
1596 Peter Lowe (c1550–1612) wrote ‘An easy, certain, and perfect
method to cure and prevent the Spanish sickness Wherby the
learned and skilful chirugian may heal a great many other diseases.’
Arellian: 1596.
‘you shall use a decoction of salsparil 100 , or gaiac, according to his
100 Salsparil =sarsaparilla= Smilax ariistolochiaefolia. Introduced into European medicine in 1536 from Mexico
as a treatment for syphilis