heir health and their lives.

His great remedy, which he gave oftener than any other, was nitre; which
he ordered in doses of twenty or thirty grains to adults, and of three
grains to infants. Measles, colics, sciatica, headache, giddiness, and
many other ailments, all found themselves treated, and I trust bettered,
by nitre; a pretty safe medicine in moderate doses, and one not likely
to keep the good Governor awake at night, thinking whether it might not
kill, if it did not cure. We may say as much for spermaceti, which he
seems to have considered "the sovereign'st thing on earth" for inward
bruises, and often prescribes after falls and similar injuries.

One of the next remedies, in point of frequency, which he was in the
habit of giving, was (probably diaphoretic) antimony; a mild form of
that very active metal, and which, mild as it was, left his patients
very commonly with a pretty strong conviction that they had been taking
something that did not exactly agree with them. Now and then he gave
a little iron or sulphur or calomel, but very rarely; occasionally, a
good, honest dose of rhubarb or jalap; a taste of stinging horseradish,
oftener of warming guiacum; sometimes an anodyne, in the shape of
mithridate,--the famous old farrago, which owed its virtue to poppy
juice; [This is the remedy which a Boston divine tried to simplify. See
Electuarium Novum Alexipharmacum, by Rev. Thomas Harward, lecturer
at the Royal Chappell. Boston, 1732. This tract is in our Society's
library.] very often, a harmless powder of coral; less frequently, an
inert prescription of pleasing amber; and (let me say it softly within
possible hearing of his honored descendant), twice or oftener,--let us
hope as a last resort,--an electuary of millipedes,--sowbugs, if we must
give them their homely English name. One or two other prescriptions,
of the many unmentionable ones which disgraced the pharmacopoeia of the
seventeenth century, are to be found, but only in very rare instances,
in the faded characters of the manuscript.

The excellent Governor's accounts of diseases are so brief, that we get
only a very general notion of the complaints for which he prescribed.
Measles and their consequences are at first more prominent than any
other one affection, but the common infirmities of both sexes and of all
ages seem to have come under his healing hand. Fever and ague appears to
have been of frequent occurrence.

His published correspondence sh