e
most beneficial for bleeding. The forty-seventh aphorism of Hippocrates
(sect. 6) is, that "persons who are benefited by venesection or purging
should be bled or purged in the spring."

_Blindness._ The exact meaning of the term "sand-blind," which occurs in
the "Merchant of Venice" (ii. 2), is somewhat obscure:

"_Launcelot._ O heavens, this is my true-begotten father! who,
being more than sand-blind, high gravel blind, knows me not.

* * * * *

_Gobbo._ Alack, sir, I am sand-blind, I know you not."

It probably means very dim-sighted,[591] and in Nares's "Glossary"[592]
it is thus explained: "Having an imperfect sight, as if there was sand
in the eye." The expression is used by Beaumont and Fletcher in "Love's
Cure" (ii. 1): "Why, signors, and my honest neighbours, will you impute
that as a neglect of my friends, which is an imperfection in me? I have
been _sand-blind_ from my infancy." The term was probably one in vulgar
use.[593]

[591] Dyce's "Glossary," p. 381; cf. the word "Berlue,
pur-blinded, made sand-blind," Cotgrave's "Fr. and Eng. Dict."

[592] Vol. ii. p. 765.

[593] Bucknill's "Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare," p. 93.

_Blister._ In the following passage of "Timon of Athens" (v. 1), Timon
appears to refer to the old superstition that a lie produces a blister
on the tongue, though, in the malice of his rage, he imprecates the
minor punishment on truth, and the old surgery of cauterization on
falsehood:[594]

"Thou sun, that comfort'st, burn!--Speak, and be hang'd;
For each true word, a blister! and each false
Be as a caut'rizing to the root o' the tongue,
Consuming it with speaking!"

[594] Bucknill's "Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare," p. 258.

We may also compare the passage in "Winter's Tale" (ii. 2), where
Paulina declares:

"If I prove honey-mouth'd, let my tongue blister,
And never to my red-look'd anger be
The trumpet any more."[595]

[595] Cf., too, "Love's Labour's Lost" (v. 2):

"A blister on his sweet tongue, with my heart,
That put Armado's page out of his part."

_Bone-ache._ This was a nickname, in bygone years, for the _Lues
venerea_, an allusion to which we find in "Troilus and Cressida" (ii.
3), where Thersites speaks of "the bone-ache" as "the curse dependent on
those that war for a placket." Another name for this disease was the
"brenning or burning," a