CHAPTER I.

_Of Emolient Medicines._


The various mixtures of heat, cold, dryness, and moisture in simples,
must of necessity produce variety of faculties, and operations in them,
which now we come to treat of, beginning first at emolients.

What is hard, and what is soft, most men know, but few are able to
express. Phylosophers define that to be hard which yields not to
touching, and soft to be the contrary. An emolient, or softening
medicine is one which reduceth a hard substance to its proper
temperature.

But to leave phylosophy, and keep to physic: physicians describe
hardness to be two-fold.

1. A distention or stretching of a part by too much fulness.

2. Thick humours which are destitute of heat, growing hard in that part
of the body into which they flow.

So many properties then ought emolient medicines to have, viz. To
moisten what is dry, to discuss what is stretched, to warm what is
congealed by cold; yet properly, that only is said to mollify which
reduceth a hard substance to its proper temperature.

Dryness and thickness of humours being the cause of hardness, emolient
medicines must of necessity be hot and moist; and although you may
peradventure find some of them dry in the second or third degrees, yet
must this dryness be tempered and qualified with heat and moisture, for
reason will tell you that dry medicines make hard parts harder.

Mollifying medicines are known, 1. by their taste, 2. by their feeling.

1. In taste, they are near unto sweat, but fat and oily; they are
neither sharp, nor austere, nor sour, nor salt, neither do they
manifest either binding, or vehement heat, or cold to be in them.

2. In feeling you can perceive no roughness, neither do they stick to
your fingers like Birdlime, for they ought to penetrate the parts to
be mollified, and therefore many times if occasion be, are cutting
medicines mixed with them.