Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, BOOK XXIX. REMEDIES DERIVED FROM LIVING CREATURES., CHAP. 25.

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CHAP. 25.—REMEDIES DERIVED FROM POULTRY.

The flesh of cocks and capons, applied warm the moment it has been plucked from the bones, neutralizes the venom of serpents; and the brains, taken in wine, are productive of a similar effect. The people of Parthia, however, prefer applying a hen's brains to the wound. Poultry broth, too, is highly celebrated as a cure, and is found marvellously useful in many other cases. Panthers and lions will never touch persons who have been rubbed with it, more particularly if it has been flavoured with garlic. The broth that is made of an old cock is more relaxing to the bowels; it is very good also for chronic fevers, numbness of the limbs, cold shiverings and maladies of the joints, pains also in the head, defluxions of the eyes, flatulency, sickness at stomach, incipient tenesmus, liver complaints, diseases of the kidneys, affections of the bladder, indigestion, and asthma. Hence there are several recipes for preparing this broth; it being most efficacious when boiled up with sea-cabbage,¹ salted tunny,² capers, parsley, the plant mercurialis,³ polypodium,⁴ or dill. The best plan, however, is to boil the cock or capon with the plants above-mentioned in three congii of water, down to three semi-sextarii; after which it should be left to cool in the open air, and given at the proper moment, just after an emetic has been administered.

And here I must not omit to mention one marvellous fact, even though it bears no reference to medicine: if the flesh of poultry is mingled with gold⁵ in a state of fusion, it will absorb the metal and consume it, thus showing that it acts as a poison upon gold. If young twigs are made up into a collar and put round a cock's neck, it will never crow.

1 See B. xxii. c. 33.

2 "Cybium,." See B. ix. c. 18. Dioscorides says the plant cnecos, described by Pliny in B. xxi. c. 107.

3 See B. xxv. c. 18, and B. xxvii. c. 77.

4 See B. xvi. c. 92, and B. xxvi. cc. 37, 66.

5 "Hereupon peradventure it is that in collices and cockbroths we use to seeth pieces of gold, with an opinion to make them thereby more re- storative."—Holland.

The Natural History. Pliny the Elder. John Bostock, M.D., F.R.S. H.T. Riley, Esq., B.A. London. Taylor and Francis, Red Lion Court, Fleet Street. 1855.

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Pliny the Elder, The Natural History
John Bostock, M.D., F.R.S., H.T. Riley, Esq., B.A., Ed.

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CHAP. 25.—REMEDIES DERIVED FROM POULTRY.

Pliny the Elder, The Natural History John Bostock, M.D., F.R.S., H.T. Riley, Esq., B.A., Ed.

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CHAP. 25.—REMEDIES DERIVED FROM POULTRY.

Pliny the Elder, The Natural History
John Bostock, M.D., F.R.S., H.T. Riley, Esq., B.A., Ed.