id: liquid, are fluid or consisting. Fluid,
as wines and syrups. The wines ordinarily used to this disease are wormwood
wine, tamarisk, and buglossatum, wine made of borage and bugloss, the
composition of which is specified in Arnoldus Villanovanus, _lib. de
vinis_, of borage, balm, bugloss, cinnamon, &c. and highly commended for
its virtues: [4182]"it drives away leprosy, scabs, clears the blood,
recreates the spirits, exhilarates the mind, purgeth the brain of those
anxious black melancholy fumes, and cleanseth the whole body of that black
humour by urine. To which I add," saith Villanovanus, "that it will bring
madmen, and such raging bedlamites as are tied in chains, to the use of
their reason again. My conscience bears me witness, that I do not lie, I
saw a grave matron helped by this means; she was so choleric, and so
furious sometimes, that she was almost mad, and beside herself; she said,
and did she knew not what, scolded, beat her maids, and was now ready to be
bound till she drank of this borage wine, and by this excellent remedy was
cured, which a poor foreigner, a silly beggar, taught her by chance, that
came to crave an alms from door to door." The juice of borage, if it be
clarified, and drunk in wine, will do as much, the roots sliced and
steeped, &c. saith Ant. Mizaldus, _art. med._ who cities this story
verbatim out of Villanovanus, and so doth Magninus a physician of Milan, in
his regimen of health. Such another excellent compound water I find in
Rubeus _de distill. sect. 3._ which he highly magnifies out of Savanarola,
[4183]"for such as are solitary, dull, heavy or sad without a cause, or be
troubled with trembling of heart." Other excellent compound waters for
melancholy, he cites in the same place. [4184]"If their melancholy be not
inflamed, or their temperature over-hot." Evonimus hath a precious
_aquavitae_ to this purpose, for such as are cold. But he and most commend
_aurum potabile_, and every writer prescribes clarified whey, with borage,
bugloss, endive, succory, &c. of goat's milk especially, some indefinitely
at all times, some thirty days together in the spring, every morning
fasting, a good draught. Syrups are very good, and often used to digest
this humour in the heart, spleen, liver, &c. As syrup of borage (there is a
famous syrup of borage highly commended by Laurentius to this purpose in
his tract of melancholy), _de pomis_ of king Sabor, now obsolete, of thyme
and epithyme, hops, scol