AUREA ANTIDOTUM.

*Aurea* is helpful for rheumatic causes,

Sufficient to soothe the cold complaints of the head;

Which, because it is proven to flourish with manifold virtue:

It constricts fluxes, comforts, resolves raw matter,

And finally consumes [it], a prudent author of medicine

Should decline to give it at the first onset of the disease.

For the preceding resolution of the consumptive motion,

While it moves the humors, increases the dispersal of the rheum;

This [*Aurea*], since it flourishes with much and strong heat,

Absorbs the airy parts, feeds on the watery ones,

[While] the earthy and thick humor is retained, and this same [humor]

Having become harder forces the disease to worsen.

Such symptoms will cease, if you have first offered a lighter

Medicine, such as *Musa* or *Rubea*.

With the body purged first, when plethora is revealed

And is clear by certain signs, through phlebotomy,

Or by a laxative medicine, such as is required by

The cause of the illness, the site of the humor, and the capacity of the disease.

The fifth day after phlebotomy, but after medicine

The third demands the use of the present opiate.

What hour is better, what hour is more suitable for giving it

Perhaps you may explore: This hour is more wholesome,

Which, near to night, calls to peaceful sleep.

For nocturnal rest encloses, and all the heat

draws inward, whose presence excites *pepsis*

and increases the strength of the ingested medicine.

In a fever it is given with tepid [water], in wine without a fever.

*Aurea* restrains involuntarily flowing tears:

with frankincense mixed into it, styrax and gum mastic,

placed under the patient's tongue in the form of a pill,

or given with wine, in which you have previously boiled frankincense.

If heat, or hot humor, or the severity of a fever,

or noxious vapor or the stroke of a received sharpness,

has brought on the flux, *Aurea* will bear no fruit;

but if the coldness of the air, or a cold humor,

or a weak action of the retentive virtue,

or an over-exceeding and great repletion of the member,

brings it on, the said cure heals these causes.

Applied again in this way it is proven to be beneficial. —

For afflicted teeth, burdened by excessive pain,

when the pain arises from the sharp vapor of the stomach,

applied over the gums and temples, it will greatly

benefit this cause, mixed with the liquor of mint.

But when a rheumatic humor badly strikes the teeth,

this same medicine is effective, if a purging suitable to the cause

and worthy precedes it, just as the form of the following doctrine

will dictate later how it is to be done. —

Which brings on sudden attacks, and repeats its movements

moment by moment, *Aurea* tames all the wickedness

of epilepsy, taken with tepid wine,

to which boiled peony has given its own properties,

which, with powder from the aforementioned root mixed into it,

so that a firm substance is suitable for preparing pills,

Placed under the tongue it guards against epileptic attacks.

It prevails in restraining the enormous movements of mania,

When, harmed by the darkness of a melancholic cloud,

The phantastic faculty deviates from its proper acts:

A single decoction of this medicine ought to be given,

With the earthy particles removed from it,

Which have more of dregs and coarse material,

With a reed, in the dark, lest it be discovered by the sick man.

For if by chance he were to examine these things by the judgment of his sight,

The sick man would shrink back in horror, and believe it to be poison,

The disturbance of his fearful sense would disturb his mind,

By the vice of horror the horror of the mania would increase.

Or where the head must be cut on the left side,

So that a little cloud of thick smoke infecting the brain

Can breathe out, according to the shape and pattern of the iron

By which a spherical or long incision ought to be made:

This medicine must be fitted upon the top of the head.

A mania made from red bile or from blood

*Aurea* does not repress, but rather kindles and increases it,

It feeds and sharpens the madness and the cause of the frenzy.

But to distinguish for you the various causes of diseases,

Which the same appearance encloses and confines in a common

Boundary, the discrete system of signs will teach,

Which I now conceive, about to bring it forth at the legitimate

Time of birth, when it will have already grown to full years,

And the now unformed seed will be able to produce mature fruits

From itself: but as yet my harvest is in the blade.

For those whom a violent cough affects, of a panting lung

It tempers with fair moderation the unbridled pulses,

Which either rheum incites, or a constricting chill,

Or a freezing humor implanted in the canals of the organ.

*Aurea* is of no benefit, if a drying out the cough

Should provoke, or a hot humor, or the mass of a tumor

Or heat, or the compaction of hard material.

Earthy material is proven to be raw and compact,

When what is expectorated is thick and excessively cohesive,

Viscous, meager, scarcely torn from the lung,

The difficult expulsion of which is slow to be resolved,

Badly shaking the chest and fatiguing the throat.

A cough described by these signs refuses of this medicine

The service, until, the crudity having been removed,

The humor, rendered more concocted, becomes resolvable,

And nature or the work of art has digested it.

For, as long as the cause of the disease coheres with a firm bond,

Entangled in the suffering part, it is itself rendered

Harder, excessively solidified by the heat of the antidote:

Whence it happens that the cure of the disease is not easy.

Therefore the region of the chest demands first to be anointed

With soft ointments, the chymes shut up in the breast

Which can relax, and resolve what is raw.

Free sputa indicate digested material,

Which, lightly expectorated, relieve and diminish the pain.

When the signs of completed pepsis have become clear to you:

Then finally *Aurea*, with the powder of gum mixed into it,

Divided into pills, having of a larger bean

The appearance; until it has been resolved by heat,

It ought to be held for a long time placed under the tongue.

Taken thus, it heals a rheumatic cough better,

And to the brain by reason of proximity its power

It more freely directs, from whose source flowing,

It restrains the rheumatic streams by the virtue of opium,

Through hot species it dries watery humors,

And through gum it soothes the respiratory members,

And strengthens them, so that the burden, by which they are kept pressed down,

They may more promptly expel, being thus freed, the cough having been resolved. —

This assists consumptives at the first threshold of the disease,

But then it is especially beneficial, when by the descending path

Of sharp rheum it beats at the doors of the lung

A harmful drop: but a more advanced cause will be more harmful.

It cures the asthmatics, whom the heavy inhalation of breath afflicts,

in whom cold humor abounds,

filling the hidden breathing passages of the vital member.

Let this be the method, this the form of giving: dissolved in unmixed wine,

in which gentian has been boiled, you should expose it to the heat

of the air, until, solidified by the absorbed liquid,

it yields to being formed into pills,

or until it returns to its proper shape, with the moisture exhausted,

which the first crushing of the spices had given it,

and, dried further, it becomes powder from powder.

Let the pills be given in wafers, but the powder in an egg.

Given with wine and rose liquid,

it revives and restores cardiac patients, if carefully joined to it is

clove, borage, thyme, the precious wood,

which the unknown head of the Nile transmits to the Indians,

*Blacta Bysantia*, and nutmeg, fragrant mace,

and the bony hardness, which in the left part of the heart

the stag has within itself, like a cartilage.

When through *anagoge*, with its natural seat left behind,

the blood goes into exile from the veins, moved by a symptom,

and flows by the path of an unaccustomed region,

*Aurea* is beneficial: but there is need to discern the various causes.

Generally these are accustomed to induce a bloody flux:

dryness, cold, heat, fullness, putrefaction,

rheum, labor, leaping, shouting, contusion, a fall.

If through *anastomosis* blood is poured from the mouth:

*Aurea* with rose juice, with mastic mixed into it,

taken in pills, to be held in the patient's mouth,

purifies, dries, solidifies, and restrains the flux;

But taken with wine, it curbs a flux caused by coldness.

If heat has introduced the disease, or abundant blood

Distending the vessels, or a drying-out thinning

The veins, or excessive labor, or rheum, or a blow,

Art commands that to these causes other cures be applied.

With castoreum added to it, with the seed of wild

Cabbage, and powder of cress equally mixed in,

If formed into a pill and held for a long time in a closed mouth,

It relieves impairment of the tongue, and frees the powers of speech

And redeems them from the servitude of paralysis.

This, dissolved in the juice of eupatorium, or of the herb

Which draws its name from the disease of paralysis itself,

Taken by mouth, for distant and remote limbs,

Sluggish to movement, weighed down by numbness of sensation,

Restores the governance of movement and the vigor of sensation.

It is expedient that an anointing of the injured part should precede,

And that soft poultices should come first, with which the rheumatic

Humor cohering to the nerves with a firm bond

May be made softer, dispersed, and thinned.

But you should seek to know in which places the medicine is to be applied,

And consider it well, and with the investigation of an acute mind

Providently explore, lest if by chance it is to be bound

To the back of the head, the spine, the neck, or the face,

You mistakenly presume to apply it to failing fingers;

More often the suffering of the fingers is removed

By medicine applied to the bones of the back, which Galen

In the book which he composed on suffering members,

Proved by certain reasoning, to the marvel of many.

Medicine more strongly conquers the pain of a member,

When joined to the places where the first origin of the evil is founded,

Where the root of the matter sprouts, from whence to remote

Parts the confusion of the silent disease approaches.

When the disease is founded in the origin of the nerves,

Which the face, relaxed by flaccidity, reveals,

*Aurea* dissolved in *musceoleum*, roasted with cyclamen,

Ought to be rubbed onto the back of the head and the neck,

Smeared upon the burdened limbs by the service of the hands.

Retaining the suitable partnership of *musceoleum*,

This same medicine greatly relieves the pain of the kidneys and the sides,

Which either cold alone or a cold humor creates.

If a windy force inflicts the evil, and, with its access for

Respiring taken away, enclosed in the caverns of the sides,

Driven by a wandering motion, it beats upon the inner parts of the heart:

Let *Aurea* mixed with unmixed wine be given late in the evening,

With which you have boiled fennel, gromwell, or dill,

And anise, saxifrage, and parsley.

Given thus, it purges the bladder of accumulated sands,

If no mixture of opium or gold is present,

And it is moderately enriched with balsamic liquor,

Which, transfused into the male member with a syringe as guide,

Allied to *musceoleum* or nard liquor,

Breaks and files down stones, and completely dissolves them.

Given with warm water to the patient, the body having been purged,

At a time that anticipates the attack by two hours,

It shatters and crushes tertians, which a degenerate humor,

Created in the belly by a defect of mixture, produces;

It excludes true quartans and amphimerinas;

In a quartan fever, unless on the third or second day

A purging has been done in the legitimate course,

The use of the antidote has no power nor profits at all;

The third day after the medicine claims its aid.

You will give the antidote with warm water if summer boils,

You should administer it with warm wine when winter dominates,

This with opium withdrawn from it, lest perhaps a degenerate action,

And one contrary to the cause, should follow from it,

And lest constriction snatch away the laws of loosening.

When placed beneath the womb with the juice of wild rue

It opens the female parts closed by an excess of cold,

And the uterine chambers, which a watery humor

Lubricates, and renders swampy with excessive decay,

It cleanses, making them fit for lawful conceptions. —

When a dispute is concerned with rheum: let it be given

With the powder of frankincense added, the opium not having been removed from it. —

Which, when drunk with wine of castor,

Represses and calms the future tumults of the apoplectic plague;

But when the evil is present and the storm of the disease is pressing,

With the teeth opened by a wedge, with the head prone,

It will be useful for the tongue to be rubbed very often with it.

Those whom colic pain afflicts, when a stormy rheum

Strikes the lowest intestines with a phlegmatic whip,

Which an evacuation of a foamy form demonstrates to you:

*Aurea* drunk with wine of frankincense will help.

But when a viscous and cold humor is introduced to the intestines,

Causing the crises of colic disease,

It is beneficial for the hind parts to be rubbed with soft ointments,

Afterwards an infused decoction of mercury helps,

Of bran and mallow, if you mix honey and olive oil

With salt. But it concludes the work and completes everything

Mixed with unmixed wine, with the liquid retained and the dregs left behind,

*Aurea* injected through a reed into the private parts,

Distant from the extreme ends in equal balance,

The liquid is made pleasing to the nerves under the peace of warmth,

Lest either coldness bite them or heat burn them.

Arising from cold and viscous humors

Applied to the lower parts, it resolves a tenesmus.

*Aurea* is composed of things diverse among themselves,

Which a diverse *crasis* varies, an unequal substance,

A dissimilar virtue, number, and differing proportion. —

The examination of the weight varies, and reason distinguished by fourfold

Causes weighs out the tenor of the balance,

From which, scattered into contraries, eight causes flow:

Strength, weakness; violence, sluggish laziness of a relaxed

Action; a greater number of species,

Or a lesser, which a union of similar form binds together;

Or because the compound needs one more or less,

So that it may better acquire and obtain its proper action. —

A lustral space provides stable vigor to this.

Its dose is handed down by physicians as half an ounce,

Which ancient physicians once used to regulate

Under the appearance of a small nut, because there was a greater

Abundance of powder for it, when it had a minimum of honey.

Now the changed law of preparing it varies the dose.