20 Pastils have also dives faculties. For some are suitable for agglutinating and making the scar upon recent wounds: such as that containing copper ore, antimony sulphide, soda-scum, flowers of copper, oak-galls, split alum moderately boiled, each 4 grams, calcined copper and pomegranate-heads, each 12 grams. It should be dissolved with vinegar, and so smeared on for agglutinating a would. But if the part wounded involves sinews or muscles, it is better to mix the pastil with a cerate, eight parts of the former to nine of the latter. Another for the same purpose is composed of bitumen and split alum, each 4 grams, calcined copper 16 grams, litharge 44 grams, oil half a litre. But the pastil of Polyides called the "seal" is by far the most celebrated. It contains split alum 4·66 grams, blacking 8 grams, myrrh 20 grams, ling aloes the same, pomegranate heads and ox-bile, 24 grams each; these are rubbed together and taken up in dry wine. For foul ulcerations and gangrene in the ears, nostrils and genitals, and their inflammatory complications, take chrysocolla 4 grams, blacking and split alum 8 grams each, winter cherry bark 16 grams, minium 24 grams, litharge 48 grams, white lead 64 grams; these are both compounded with vinegar and dissolved for use with the same. The pastil of Andron is for inflammation of the uvula, and for the genitals when foul, and even when affected by canker. It contains oak-galls, blacking, and myrrh, 4 grams each, aristolochia and split[p. 47] alum, 8 grams each, pomegranate-heads 100 grams, compounded with raisin wine, and when required for use dissolved in vinegar or wine, according as the disease to be treated is more severe or milder. But the following is appropriate for anal fissures, for bleeding piles, or for canker, verdigris 8 grams, myrrh 16 grams, gum 32 grams, frankincense 48 grams, antimony sulphide, poppy tears and acacia, 64 grams each. These are both pounded up in wine and for actual use are dissolved in the same. The following present is efficacious to expel stones from the bladder along with the urine; casia, crocus, myrrh, costmary, nard, cinnamon, liquorice root, balsamum and hypericum juice, equal parts; these are rubbed together, then mild wine is poured on, and pastils are made, each weighing 0·66 gram; one of them is given every morning on an empty stomach.
De Medicina. Celsus. W. G. Spencer. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard University Press. 1971 (Republication of the 1935 edition).
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