SUBSECTION 2 Simple remedies suited to melancholy Against imported simples

Medicines appropriately used against melancholy are either simple or compound. Simples are either alterative or purgative. Alteratives correct or strengthen the body’s natural powers, bring about change, or in some way hinder or resist the disease. They include herbs, stones, minerals and other things suited to this humour. For just as many distinct illnesses continually afflict us—

Diseases come to people by day and by night, Roaming of themselves, bringing harm to mortals In silence, since wise Zeus took away their voice.

Diseases steal upon people by day and night, For Jupiter has taken their voice away.

so there are different remedies: as the writer says, “a medicine for each disease, for every humour.” Some hold that every climate, every country and, more than that, every particular place has its own remedies growing there, almost specially adapted to its prevailing and most frequent illnesses.

As one writer explains: “Wormwood grows sparsely in Italy, because people there are mostly afflicted by hot diseases; instead, henbane, poppy and similar cold herbs grow there. With us in Germany and Poland, wormwood abounds on every piece of waste ground.” Baricelli, in The Delightful Garden, and Giambattista della Porta, in Physiognomics, book 6, chapter 23, give many examples and bring forward much further proof.

Perhaps for this reason the learned Fuchs of Nuremberg, “whenever he came to a village, always considered which herbs grew most abundantly around it, and distilled those in a silver alembic,” using other herbs among them as occasion required.

I know that many believe our northern simples to be weak and imperfect, less thoroughly matured and less potent than those from southern regions, and less suited to medicine. They therefore fetch their drugs from far away: senna and cassia from Egypt, rhubarb from Barbary, aloes from Socotra; turpeth, agaric, myrobalans and hermodactyls from the East Indies; tobacco from the West Indies; some drugs from as far away as China; hellebore from Anticyra, or the Austrian variety with purple flowers so highly approved by Mattioli, and so with the rest.

In the kingdom of Valencia in Spain, Magini commends two mountains, Mariola and Renagolosa, famous for medicinal plants. Leandro Alberti commends Monte Baldo, near Lake Garda in the territory of Verona, to which all the region’s herbalists constantly flock; Ortelius, a mountain in Apulia; Münster, Monte Maggiore in Istria; and others, Montpellier in France. Prospero Alpini prefers Egyptian simples, Garcia da Orta those of India, others those of Italy, Crete and so on.

They are often too fastidious in this, as Fuchs rebukes them in his Institutes, book 1, section 1, chapter 1: “They think they have achieved nothing unless they scour India, Arabia and Ethiopia for remedies, fetching their medicines from three quarters of the world and from beyond the Garamantes. An old woman or countrywoman often does more good with a few familiar, common garden herbs than our puffed-up physicians with all their extraordinary, costly, far-fetched, rare and speculative medicines.” Without question, if we lack these rare imported simples, we have things at home equivalent in medicinal power. Ours will serve as well as theirs if taken in proportionate quantities and properly prepared and adjusted—if not much better, and more suitably for our constitutions.

But it is generally as Pliny writes to Gallus: “We neglect what is near us and pursue what is far away, travelling and sailing overseas to learn about it, while wholly overlooking what lies before our eyes.”

Opium scarcely harms people in Turkey, while here a small quantity stupefies us; cicuta, or hemlock, is a powerful poison in Greece, but here it has no such violent effects. I conclude with I. Voschius: while strongly attacking those imported medicines, he promises a complete and absolute cure of all diseases through our European remedies, “from head to heel; the herbs of our own region are more beneficial to our bodies”—our own simples agree best with us.

Fernel worked hard in his French practice to conduct all treatment with our own domestic medicines. So did Janus Cornarius and Martin Ruland in Germany, and T. B. here, as appears from his treatise published in English in 1615 to prove that English medicines suffice to cure every kind of disease.

If our simples are not quite as potent or as suitable, perhaps, with equal care, those far-fetched medicinal plants would flourish here as well as in the countries from which we now obtain them, just as cherries, artichokes, tobacco and many others do. Several worthy physicians have conducted excellent experiments of this kind, as have many diligent, hardworking apothecaries, such as Gesner, Besler, Gerard and others.

Above all, those famous public gardens at Padua in Italy, Nuremberg in Germany, Leiden in Holland and Montpellier in France deserve great praise—as does ours at Oxford, now being established at the expense of the Right Honourable Lord Danvers, Earl of Danby. In them almost every foreign plant can be seen, and generous annual funds are provided for their upkeep, so that young students may learn about them more readily.

For, as Fuchs holds, this knowledge “is essential to that accomplished method of healing.” It is as shameful for a physician not to study these plants as for a craftsman not to know his axe, saw, square or any other tool he must use.