ELECTUARIUM PSYLLITICUM.

*Psylliticum* fights against choler in the first contest,

It strikes salty phlegm with the second blow:

Finally, in the encounter it conquers adust choler.

It storms the forces of choler with the javelin of scammony,

Which an equal kinship of form draws to the choler,

A similar union of nature, a sisterly power.

Since the knot of friendship, a formal bond, preserves

Unharmed things firm under stable strength,

Why does scammony put choler to flight, why does an unjust enemy

Pursue what is similar to itself, which crasis,

And a similar taste, and an agreeing substance had together allied to it?

A torch is the food of fire, oil is the spur and stimulus

Of a lamp, the drinking of wine is the nourisher of fever,

Inebriation the kindling of luxury; bilious matter grows

From pungent feasts, blood from sweetness,

The humor of phlegm overflows from insipid things;

The wave of wandering Tethys, spread out in a capacious bosom,

Collects the coming rivers in a placid embrace:

The rule of nature, which wanders through other things by a common law,

And suffers no pebble, but guides its chariot on a level path,

Fails, discolored, in the case of bile,

Which scammony—indignant that a thing similar to itself should be shut up

Together with it in the same prison like a rebel—

Destroys, and cruel and inhospitable, drives out its companion.

This reasoning does not hold, and, not resting on a firm course,

The false opinion limps with an uncertain step:

It does not follow, because a thing is harmonious with another, that it

Owes to it the favor of augmentation, as if bound by an oath.

A greater grace obtains the advance of augmentation,

A fuller assent, a union of nature implanted from many forms,

And the power of converting;

A single form does not plead that a transition be made.

For metamorphosis, the daughter of the changing power,

Transforms the species of things, proceeding by a threefold

Order of motion: for when harmonious matter is laid beneath it

With a concordant peace of favor,

Flattering its artificer, whom a harmonious line of nature

Joins and assimilates to the materialized thing:

The power, transformed by so great a love of the serving matter,

Prolongs its act no further:

It seeks no further truces; already it applies itself to it,

Conquered by its compliance, and now it refines it,

Moves it and transposes the middle parts to the lowest,

Draws the depressed parts to the middle, elevates the middle ones,

Treads the highest parts into the middle ones, the lateral ones into the highest:

It exterminates and banishes the unstable and overly wandering forms,

And the foreign handmaidens of nature.

With substantive forms there is a great struggle

And a difficult wrestling; these, more strongly attached

To general nature and joined by a friendly pact,

With the body of the subject and the character of its right intact,

The converting power cannot entirely subvert.

For thus the being of a thing amicably conspires with its form

And thus its form is wedded to the subject:

Such a great connection of a relative knot binds these,

Which, when established, establish themselves, and when destroyed, remove themselves;

Each depends upon the other, flourishes, and subsists;

Which brings about the being of a thing, which confirms the thing and

Establishes the species itself; when the form leaves its subject,

The substance, passing out of existence, suffers its corruptible fall

And sprouts forth again with another origin.

Which, although clothed from its first origin with many

Inner garments of forms, and wedded to its own proper form,

And endowed with a necklace as a sign of chastity,

Nature compelling, ungirt with a loosened bosom,

Seeks other embraces, seeks new kisses,

Prostitutes itself and joins itself as an adulteress to an external form,

And unfaithful to the marriage bed, with the first spouse despised,

Stripped bare, marries a new husband as a new bride.

Such espousals multiply the powers of cholera,

When a similar food or drink, or the nearest humor,

When it generates the form of cholera by the power of heat.

*Scamonea* cannot do this, since it claims the function

Of medicine alone, to which no harmony of a material knot

Binds a humor or a member.

The power of rhubarb, the seeds of fumitory,

A small root of oak, covered with small beds,

Mimicking the shape of a fern, arm *Psylliticum*:

With these arms, the potent medicine pursues the cholera

With salty phlegm, which burning heat has blackened

And compelled to mimic the form of an Ethiopian.

In fevers, which leap forth from cholera or salty phlegm,

It will be able to provide a celebrated remedy,

In which there are truces, in which a breeze intermixed with storms

Is pleasing, in which a sweet calm among the clouds

Alternates through various turns, in which an hour of rest

Pleasant, though interrupted, it succeeds heavy labor,

and compensates for the penalty of the affliction and redeems the pain:

To simple tertians, and those which doubled matter has created,

it imparts aid and ministers a cure:

But beware, lest a languishing thinness, destitute of humor,

press bones against the skin, lest old age, the herald of death,

plough the body with wrinkles, lest a small and languid strength,

orphaned of spirits, labor like a beggar,

lest heat burn the liver, lest cold freeze the body,

and lest the burning heat of the weather stir up excessive fires.

If the strength is stable, the constitution fuller, the age

sound and complete with a firm tenor of powers:

If the weather corresponds to the rest in a certain order

and the liver remains healthy, a suitable purgation for the said causes

will be accomplished by the Psyllitic medicine,

which no other anxiety of suspected evil stirs, no

unreliable anxiety of a future event shakes. —

Synochus shuns Psylliticum, and causon profanes it:

The continuous tertian abhors its approach,

which unceasing labor and the continuation of the penalty

deny to be a tertian, but a sharper attack and the fiercer anger of heat,

which the third day stirs and repeats and brings back around,

prove to be a tertian.

Psylliticum draws its movement of rancor, its anger of sharpness

from the addition of sharp and harsh scammony.

If the overly daring license of a physician, deviating from right

judgment, grants this use to a wretched patient,

whom an acute disease born of cholera torments,

it sharpens the disease, it feeds the feverish burning heats,

And it further kindles the vessels widely kindled by febrile heat

and adds fire to fires

and disturbs critical movements from their certain order.

The location of the humor, not its form, causes this, because to the form

of the humor of choler the virtue of scammony corresponds:

But the place rejects and detests this same [virtue],

the region of the vessels boiling with the putrefaction of choler.

When bilious force rages in the veins and alone pours in

the matter of the disease, and no humor of phlegm

meets it from outside to bridle the sharpness of the choler,

the course of the disease becomes shorter, the onslaught of burning

ascends on high, the fierce force of sharp heat

suddenly brings in the cause of a suspected crisis:

Whence nature demands a medicine to be given to herself,

which drives out not the matter but only the sharpness,

which helps and restores, and cools that very burning,

which lubricates and loosens with mild control the belly

bound by the burning heat of the febrile dyscrasia.

A minor hemitritaeus, which the turbid cold of winter,

and a kindred region similar to winter delays,

and forces to grow sluggish with the torpor of a slow crasis,

lest it scatter the wealth of its host, lest the prodigal guest

squander the goods of nature, lest a slower enemy

enervate the vigor of the body with slow warfare—

nature, having struggled long, exhausted by long labor,

with many attempts previously carried out in vain,

must on the eighteenth day be helped

by a psyllitic medicine, lest she fail.

For choler, if there is time, and the abundant matter of the disease

and its digestion should be evident by their signs,

a soothing and mild light decoction is to be given,

suitable to the nature of the disease, from which once or twice

on the eighteenth day a purgation may be made;

Which if by chance its movements, with nothing previously accomplished

Should the troublesome fever, having been calmed by good things, return,

And threaten new battle lines and second wars:

To *Psylliticum*, so that it may complete the cure with a successful act,

Let the dispute of the old complaint be entrusted to be decided,

And let it settle the case and reform the lost rights.

Although perplexing due to the peril of a doubtful outcome,

This custom of healing with celebrated rite, the provident

Land of Salerno cultivates and worthily venerates,

A city sacred to Phoebus, zealous nurse of Minerva,

Fount of physics, champion of good constitution, cultivator of medicine,

Attendant of nature, bridesmaid of life, of health

Matron of honor, a more faithful sister to Lachesis, an enemy to Atropos,

Destruction of disease, heavy adversary of death:

Which, because it waged a perpetual duel with death,

And cannot lead a sluggish life without war,

So that it might claim for itself the material for contest and labor

And rest in no torpor of peace:

It sits in a death-bearing region under the warming sun,

Lofty and near to heaven with star-bearing cliffs,

Which doubtless climb the aether with a bold ridge:

It wards off and excludes the breathings of the cold wind,

Constrained by its site: hanging from the sloping hill

It leans over the sea, which grazes its walls

And leaps against its projecting houses with playing waves.

Shielded behind by towering mountains, vapors

And thick fogs and only the south wind it drinks in,

And it gathers the foul contagions of the corrupted sky:

But of medicines, which the mountainous places supply to it,

The city thrives armed with darts: powerfully with death

It struggles: it extirpates diseases and blunts the fates:

It relieves nature, and reties the broken threads:

It presses the kingdoms of death, with which, although

It cannot come to terms, it seeks truces and prolongs life,

And those it does not remove, it delays as future perils.

Which if it were not so fruitful and thrived with such great

Counsels, if the Delphic spirit of the physical art

Did not inspire it, swallowed up by the whirlpool of death

And unable to boil its course, it would perish pitiably.

But an enemy fighting well makes you fight well,

Greater skill prevails in adverse circumstances,

Endurance of a miserable fate compels the seed

Of genius to grow, poverty fertilizes the senses,

Nor does disturbance of the mind allow its strength to languish;

The more it is afflicted and burdened by the army of diseases,

And is drawn by various blows, the more bravely it resists

And devises strong arts of fighting,

And pierces diseases with sharp *Psylliticum*.

O if only it thrived as much in arms as in virtue,

As much as it excels in the art of healing, so in fighting:

It would not be able to tremble at the barbarity of Teutonic

Fury: it would fear neither swords nor wars.

Divisives having been given beforehand, which the humor demands,

If a potion of *Psylliticum* is given in the springtime,

It preserves bodies healthy from future disease,

Which dominating cholera might arrange, the accustomed humor

Of phlegm having endured the fellowship of hostile cholera:

If by chance it wishes to purge remote parts,

Under a solid form, which the confection provides it,

If a light indignation of the belly should provoke vomiting,

So that sleep may approach, you should administer it in the middle of the night:

If the stomach is heavy toward vomiting, if through the medicine

It is expedient that the places bordering the belly be purged,

Lest its power perish, excluded by the peace of sleep,

It must be administered in the morning dissolved in a tepid liquid. —

The rule of reason forbids giving *Psylliticum* with cold

A rule, which the more solemn custom of the ancients celebrates;

This public opinion holds a solemn course,

That no medicine ought to be given with cold water,

Which the harsh force of fierce scammony sharpens:

For while the ascetic power of cold water entangles the scammony

In the villi of the stomach and prevents it from being dissolved,

It generates tortures, fevers, and excessive pains

And makes the intestines bloody with the flux of dysentery.

If the bilious humor, with the mouth of its cyst closed,

Should seethe, deforming the limbs with a jaundiced color:

If a tertian should be kindled, or if there should dominate

The fiery force of excessive cholera without fever:

If the blood should adopt the force of bile through the heat of the liver,

It is established that *Psylliticum* confers friendly help. —

Until the sun has twice traversed the zodiacal circle,

*Psylliticum* is able to preserve its vigor unimpaired.