Receipt

Use in the book

Ordinary receipts stand among the practical means in which prescribers and patients may place excessive confidence. Burton reproaches gain-seeking and reliance on medicines above God. The surrounding argument expressly honours physicians and requires prayer and medicine together; it does not reject ordinary treatment or declare every recipe ineffective.

Reading a formula is also different from being competent to administer it. Burton warns against trying a receipt from a book without an approved physician’s consent: a remedy can benefit one patient and harm another, while a misread weight can be disastrous. He makes that concern a limit on his own writing, declining to insert recipes and doses that might prompt an uninformed reader to practise on himself.

Recipes can nevertheless change legitimately. The complaints about every city and practitioner inventing formulas are followed by an explicit reversal. Burton defends compounds where necessary, allows recipes to vary with use, and describes experience as continually improving medicine. His attack on ostentatious novelty should not be extracted as his final judgment on all new formulas. The love recipes belong to a different, condemned use of the recipe form, among magical expedients resorted to when seduction fails.

The figurative and financial uses sharpen the boundaries. Gold is an excellent receit in the joke because the miser enjoys seeing money in his chest: Erastus’s reported concession denies the medicinal benefit being claimed for it. By contrast, the receipts are simply incoming public funds, set against expenses in the annual accounts required by Burton’s imagined commonwealth.

Related entries

Physick

Physician

Patient

Apothecaries measures

Experimental

Confection

Decoction

Electuaries

Oxymel

Places to read

1. Democritus Junior to the Reader · paragraphs 10–12Financial receipts and expenses in the proposed public accounts.
2. Member 2. Lawful Cures, First From God · paragraphs 2–4Prayer and ordinary medical means are expressly joined.
3. Member 2. Lawful Cures, First From God · paragraphs 17–20Customary prescriptions, confidence, profit and religious duty.
4. Subsection 2. Concerning the Patient · paragraphs 38–42Book recipes, patient differences and dangerous self-trial.
5. Subsection 4 Precious Stones Metals and Minerals as Alteratives · paragraphs 34–38Gold’s figurative benefit to the miser within a dispute over medicinal minerals.
6. Subsection 5 Compound Alteratives Criticism of Compounds and Mixed Medicines · paragraphs 9–18Criticism of proliferating formulas followed by a defence of necessary compounds and improvement.
7. Subsection 3 Compound Purgatives · paragraphs 42–45Burton’s refusal to publish further recipes and doses here.
8. Subsection 5 Procurers and Love Potions as Causes · paragraphs 53–55Magical love recipes as a condemned resort.

In this edition

“ordinary receipts” becomes “customary prescriptions”: customary explains ordinary, while prescriptions supplies the medical sense. “a receipt in a book” becomes “a recipe in a book”, and “receits and magistrals” becomes “recipes and special formulations”. Magistrals is the adjoining designation of special formulations, not part of what receipts alone means.

“an excellent receit against Melancholy” becomes “an excellent remedy for melancholy”, preserving the figurative joke. In the accounting passage, “all receipts, expences” becomes “every receipt and expense”; the unchanged modern financial word must be read in that context.

Receipt · receipts · local use 1

Printed “receipts” (English; family).

Prescriptions or recipes specifying medicinal preparations.

Here: Ordinary describes the practitioner’s customary formulas.

Context: Burton reproaches excessive trust in remedies and motives of gain; he has expressly required prayer and medicine together.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: ordinary receipts

Modern rendering: customary prescriptions

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention, Alignment convention.

Further local use

Printed “receipt” (English; family).

Here: A written recipe can tempt its reader into unskilled self-treatment.

Context: Burton forbids such independent trials without an approved physician’s consent and explains patient differences and dosing errors.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: a receipt in a book

Modern rendering: a recipe in a book

Sense relation: The same lexical sense in a further distinct local use or qualification.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention, Alignment convention.

Further local use

Printed “receits” (English; family).

Here: Medical recipes vary with experience and changing practice.

Context: After rehearsing complaints about novelty, Burton defends necessary compounds and legitimate continuing improvement.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: receits and magistrals

Modern rendering: recipes and special formulations

Word and construction: Receits supplies recipes; magistrals separately supplies special formulations.

Sense relation: The same lexical sense in a further distinct local use or qualification.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention.

Further local use

Printed “receipts” (English; family).

Here: The word names formulas whose doses Burton declines to publish here.

Context: Burton cites Foreest’s censure of vernacular medical publishing and fears enabling ignorant self-treatment.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: many receipts of prescribed potions, boles

Modern rendering: many recipes for prescribed potions, boluses

Sense relation: The same lexical sense in a further distinct local use or qualification.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention, Alignment convention.

Further local use

Printed “receits” (English; family).

Here: Recipes are extended to preparations intended to compel love.

Context: Burton presents these as desperate and condemned expedients, not legitimate medical prescriptions.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: Magical Philters, and receits

Modern rendering: magical love potions and recipes

Word and construction: Receits supplies recipes; Magical Philters supplies magical love potions within the coordinated group.

Sense relation: The same lexical sense in a further distinct local use or qualification.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention.

Receipt · receit

Printed “receit” (English; family).

A remedy or means of obtaining a desired effect; here figurative.

Here: Possession and contemplation of money cheer the miser.

Context: Burton reports Erastus’s restriction of gold’s benefit to money in a chest, reinforced by the poetic joke; this is not an endorsement of medicinal gold.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: an excellent receit against Melancholy

Modern rendering: an excellent remedy for melancholy

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention, Alignment convention.

Receipt · receipts · local use 2

Printed “receipts” (English; family).

Sums or revenues received.

Here: Receipts are the incoming side of public accounts.

Context: In his proposed commonwealth Burton requires annual accounting from officials; the word here denotes money received, not medical formulas or necessarily written acknowledgments.

Source: original body

Source wording and original alignment: all receipts, expences

Modern rendering: every receipt and expense

Word and construction: Receipts supplies receipt in the singular after every; expences supplies expense. All is redistributed as every over the coordinated financial items.

Alignment conventions: Alignment convention.