ure mistakes I have wrote them att large wee have great
want with the greatest halt and speed let us be supplyed. Sr Yr Sert WILL
LOCHS

(Endorsed)

Mr. Lockes Letter Recd from the Governor 13 Jane & acquainted ye Council
with it but could not obtaine any thing to be sent in answer thereto.
13 June 1676

I have given some idea of the chief remedies used by our earlier
physicians, which were both Galenic and chemical; that is, vegetable and
mineral. They, of course, employed the usual perturbing medicines which
Montaigne says are the chief reliance of their craft. There were,
doubtless, individual practitioners who employed special remedies with
exceptional boldness and perhaps success. Mr. Eliot is spoken of, in a
letter of William Leete to Winthrop, Junior, as being under Mr.
Greenland's mercurial administrations. The latter was probably enough
one of these specialists.

There is another class of remedies which appears to have been employed
occasionally, but, on the whole, is so little prominent as to imply a
good deal of common sense among the medical practitioners, as compared
with the superstitions prevailing around them. I have said that I have
caught the good Governor, now and then, prescribing the electuary of
millipedes; but he is entirely excused by the almost incredible fact that
they were retained in the materia medica so late as when Rees's
Cyclopaedia was published, and we there find the directions formerly
given by the College of Edinburgh for their preparation. Once or twice
we have found him admitting still more objectionable articles into his
materia medica; in doing which, I am sorry to say that he could plead
grave and learned authority. But these instances are very rare
exceptions in a medical practice of many years, which is, on the whole,
very respectable, considering the time and circumstances.

Some remedies of questionable though not odious character appear
occasionally to have been employed by the early practitioners, but they
were such as still had the support of the medical profession. Governor
John Winthrop, the first, sends for East Indian bezoar, with other
commodities he is writing for. Governor Endicott sends him one he had of
Mr. Humfrey. I hope it was genuine, for they cheated infamously in the
matter of this concretion, which ought to come out of an animal's
stomach, but the real history of which resembles what is sometimes told
of modern sausages.

There is a famous law-case