MEMBER 2. Retention and evacuation corrected.

In discussing the causes, I have shown the harm constipation has done in bringing on this disease. If it is so harmful, its opposite must surely be good, or at least the middle course must be, as indeed it is, and is necessary for this cure. “It is most beneficial,” says Montalto, chapter 27: it helps very greatly.

Altomarus, chapter 7, recommends a morning walk into pleasant, green fields, but insists that these ordinary bodily wastes first be evacuated, naturally or through medical help. Piso calls it “the benefit of the belly”: the belly's benefit, help or pleasure, for it gives it great relief. Laurentius, chapter 8, and Crato, consultation 21, book 2, prescribe this at least once a day. Where nature fails, treatment must supply the lack, through laxative electuaries, suppositories, preserved prunes, turpentine and enemas, as will be shown.

Prosper Calenus, in his book On Black Bile, recommends enemas for hypochondriacal melancholy, to be used whenever the occasion requires. Peter Cnemander, in a consultation for a hypochondriacal patient, would have the patient's bowels kept continually loose, and gives many recipes for potions and enemas to that end.

Mercurialis, consultation 88, prescribes enemas first if this benefit does not come of its own accord; so does Montanus in consultations 24, 31 and 229. He recommends turpentine for this purpose, and repeats the advice in consultation 230, for an Italian abbot.

It is very good to wash the hands and face often, change one's clothes, wear clean linen, and be neatly and becomingly dressed; for “filth corrupts”—dirt defiles and depresses anyone who lives in it, whether by choice or through poverty; it dulls the spirits.

Baths are either artificially prepared or natural. Both have their particular uses in this illness and, as Alexander supposes in book 1, chapter 16, provide as speedy a remedy as any other treatment whatever. Aetius would have them used daily: “frequent baths,” Tetrabiblos 2, section 2, chapter 9. Galen boasts of the many cures of this kind he has achieved through baths alone, and Rufus's pills, moistening people who are otherwise dry.

Rhazes makes it a principal treatment: “Let the whole treatment consist in moistening”—to bathe and then anoint with oil. Jason Pratensis, Laurentius in chapter 8, and Montanus give their particular recipes for artificially prepared baths.

Crato, consultation 17, book 2, recommends boiling mallows, camomile, violets and borage in the bathwater, and sometimes using clean water alone. In the following consultation he says, “We have found that a bath of fresh water alone has very often been beneficial.” So do Fuchsius, book 1, chapter 33, and Frisimelica, book 2, consultation 42, in Trincavelius. Besides herbs, some prescribe boiling a ram's head and other things.

Fernelius, consultation 44, would have baths used for ten or twelve consecutive days. The patient must enter on an empty stomach and remain in a moderate warmth, followed by rubbing all over the body. Laelius Eugubinus, consultation 142, and Christophorus Aererus, in a consultation of his, consider bathing once or twice a week sufficient. The water should be warm, not hot, to avoid sweating.

Felix Plater, Observations, book 1, prescribing for a melancholy lawyer, would always combine these baths with washing the head in lye in which herbs for the head have been boiled. Laurentius speaks of milk baths, which I find approved by many others. After every bath the body is to be anointed with oil of bitter almonds, violet oil, fresh butter or capon fat, especially along the backbone; then come head washes, applications of liquid remedies, and so on.

Baths of this kind were much frequented in former times, in many different forms, and are still generally used in those eastern countries. The Romans had very sumptuous and stupendous public baths, such as those of Antoninus and Diocletian. Pliny, book 36, says that Rome had an immense number of them and that they were heavily frequented. Some people bathed seven times a day, as the emperor Commodus is reported to have done; usually they bathed twice a day, and afterwards were anointed with very costly ointments.

Rich women bathed in milk, some in the milk of five hundred she-asses at once. Many ruins of such baths have been found on this island among the ruined walls and rubble of old Roman towns. Lipsius, On the Greatness of the City of Rome, book 3, chapter 8; Rosinus; Schott of Antwerp; and other antiquaries tell remarkable stories of their baths.

Gillius, book 4, final chapter of his Topography of Constantinople, counts 155 public baths in Constantinople, handsomely built. Turks of every kind, men and women, still frequent them in that city and throughout Greece and those hot countries, presumably to wash away the offensive sweat to which they are subject there.

Busbecq, in his letters, describes their customs at great length: how the women go covered, followed by a maid carrying a box of ointment to rub them with. The richer people have private baths in their houses; the poorer go to the public ones. They are generally so particular about this that they will neither eat nor drink until they have bathed—some before and after meals—and will not urinate or empty their bowels without washing their hands.

Leo Africanus, book 3, mentions a hundred separate baths at Fez in Africa, very sumptuous and endowed with large revenues. Buxtorf, chapter 14 of The Jewish Synagogue, speaks of many Jewish ceremonies of this kind. They are very superstitious in their bathing, especially the women.

Natural baths are praised by some and condemned by others, but on different grounds. Marcus de Oddis, in his work on Hippocratic affections, consulted about baths, condemns them because of the liver's heat, since they dry the body too quickly. Yet shortly afterwards, in another consultation for the same disease, he approves of them because the sulphur makes them cleansing, and recommends drinking their water.

Aretaeus, chapter 7, recommends alum baths above the rest; Mercurialis, consultation 88, recommends those of Lucca for hypochondriacal illness. He would have his patient stay there for fifteen days, drink the water and be bucketed—that is, have the water poured over his head. Giovanni Battista Silvatico, controversy 64, recommends all the baths in Italy and the drinking of their water, whether they contain iron, alum or sulphur; so does Hercules de Saxonia. But because they cause sweating and dry the body so much, he confines their use to hypochondriacal melancholy, excluding melancholy of the head and the other kind.