gue or smallpox.
Common sense dictated a freeing of the body of the corrupt or
corrupting matter; drugs were a means to this end.

The use of drugs for vomiting, sweating, and other forms of purging
seems excessive in the light of present-day medical knowledge, and at
least one seventeenth-century Virginia student of medicine also found
such use of drugs by his contemporaries open to criticism. In the
opinion of the Reverend John Clayton, Virginia doctors were so prone to
associate all drugs with vomiting or other forms of purging that they
even thought of aromatic spirits as an inferior "vomitive." He
concluded that these physicians would purge violently even for an
aching finger: "they immediately [upon examining the patients] give
three or four spoonfuls [of _crocus metallorum_] ... then perhaps
purge them with fifteen or twenty grains of the rosin of jalap,
afterwards sweat them with Venice treacle, powder of snakeroot, or
Gascoin's Powder; and when these fail _conclamatum est_."

The list of drugs used was extensive and each drug had a considerable
literature written about it explaining the various sicknesses and
disorders for which it was a curative. Libraries of the Virginia
physicians and of the well-to-do laymen usually included a volume or
two on the use of drugs. Among the most popular plants, roots, and
other natural products were snakeroot, dittany, senna, alum, sweet
gums, and tobacco.

Dittany drove worms out of the body and would also produce sweat
(sweating being another popular method of purging the body of
disease-producing matter). The juices of the fever or ague-root in beer
or water "purgeth downward with some violence ... in powder ... it only
moveth sweat." (Following Galen's system of classifying by taste, this
root was bitter, therefore thought dry. The physician would administer
such a drying agent when attempting to reduce excess moistness in the
body--and thus restore normal body balance, in accord with contemporary
humoral theory.) Snakeroot, another of the popular therapeutics,
increased the output of urine and of perspiration; black snakeroot,
remedying rheumatism, gout, and amenorrhea, found such wide usage
during the last half of the seventeenth century that its price per
pound in Virginia on one occasion rose from ten shillings to three
pounds sterling. Although King James I of England saw much danger in
tobacco, others among his subjects attributed phenomenal curative
properties t