d here;
Pierc'd to the soul with slander's venom'd spear,
The which no balm can cure, but his heart-blood
Which breath'd this poison."

Once more, in "Romeo and Juliet" (i. 2), Benvolio relates how

"one fire burns out another's burning,
One pain is lessen'd by another's anguish;
Turn giddy, and be holp by backward turning;
One desperate grief cures with another's languish."

_Cataract._ One of the popular names for this disease of the eye was
the "web and the pin." Markham, in his "Cheap and Good Husbandry" (bk.
i. chap. 37), thus describes it in horses: "But for the wart, pearle,
pin, or web, which are evils grown in or upon the eye, to take them off,
take the juyce of the herb betin and wash the eye therewith, it will
weare the spots away." Florio ("Ital. Dict.") gives the following:
"Cataratta is a dimnesse of sight occasioned by humores hardened in the
eies, called a cataract or a pin and a web." Shakespeare uses the term
in the "Winter's Tale" (i. 2), where Leontes speaks of

"all eyes blind
With the pin and web, but theirs;"

and in "King Lear" (iii. 4), alluding to "the foul fiend
Flibbertigibbet," says, "he gives the web and the pin."[600] Acerbi, in
his "Travels" (vol. ii. p. 290), has given the Lapland method of cure
for this disease. In a fragment of an old medical treatise it is thus
described: "Another sykenes ther byth of _yezen; on a webbe_, a nother a
wem, that hydyth the myddel of the yezen; and this hes to maners, other
whilys he is white and thynne, and other whilys he is thykke, as whenne
the obtalmye ne is noght clene yhelyd up, bote the rote abydyth stylle.
Other whilys the webbe is noght white but rede, other blake."[601] In
the Statute of the 34 and 35 of Henry VIII. a pin and web in the eye is
recited among the "customable diseases," which honest persons, not being
surgeons, might treat with herbs, roots, and waters, with the knowledge
of whose nature God had endowed them.

[600] See Nares's "Glossary," vol. ii. pp. 660, 661; Dyce's
"Glossary," p. 322.

[601] Quoted in Singer's "Shakespeare."

_Chilblains._ These are probably alluded to by the Fool in "King Lear"
(i. 5): "If a man's brains were in's heels, were't not in danger of
kibes?" Hamlet, too, says (v. 1): "the age is grown so picked, that the
toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his
kibe."

_Deformity._ It was an old prejudice