hepherds_, and the _headsmen_, the latter of whom made often good
horse-doctors and clever surgeons, resetting bones broken or put out
of joint.

[41] The name given in fear and politeness to the witches.

I make no doubt but that his admirable and masterly work on _The
Diseases of Women_--the first then written on a theme so large, so
deep, so tender--came forth from his special experience of those women
to whom others went for aid; of the witches, namely, who always acted
as the midwives: for never in those days was a male physician admitted
to the woman's side, to win her trust in him, to listen to her
secrets. The witches alone attended her, and became, especially for
women, the chief and only physician.

* * * * *

What we know for surest with regard to their medicinal practice is,
that for ends the most different, alike to stimulate and to soothe,
they made use of one large family of doubtful and very dangerous
plants, called, by reason of the services they rendered, _The
Comforters_, or Solaneae.[42]

[42] Man's ingratitude is painful to see. A thousand other
plants have come into use: a hundred exotic vegetables have
become the fashion. But the good once done by these poor
_Comforters_ is clean forgotten!--Nay, who now remembers or
even acknowledges the old debt of humanity to harmless
nature? The _Asclepias acida_, _Sarcostemma_, or flesh-plant,
which for five thousand years was the _Holy Wafer_ of the
East, its very palpable God, eaten gladly by five hundred
millions of men,--this plant, in the Middle Ages called the
Poison-queller (_vince-venenum_), meets with not one word of
historical comment in our books of Botany. Perhaps two
thousand years hence they will forget the wheat. See Langlois
on the _Soma_ of India and the _Hom_ of Persia. _Mem. de
l'Academie des Inscriptions_, xix. 326.

A vast and popular family, many kinds of which abound to excess under
our feet, in the hedges, everywhere--a family so numerous that of one
kind alone we have eight hundred varieties.[43] There is nothing
easier, nothing more common, to find. But these plants are mostly
dangerous in the using. It needs some boldness to measure out a dose,
the boldness, perhaps, of genius.

[43] M. d'Orbigny's _Dictionary of Natural History_, article
_Morelles_.

Let us, step by step, mount the ladder of their powers.[44] The first
are