rocess but only the losing of hope by
time.

_Count._ This young gentlewoman had a father--O, that 'had!'
how sad a passage 'tis!--whose skill was almost as great as his
honesty; had it stretched so far, would have made nature
immortal, and death should have play for lack of work. Would,
for the king's sake, he were living! I think it would be the
death of the king's disease.

_Laf._ How called you the man you speak of, madam?

_Count._ He was famous, sir, in his profession, and it was his
great right to be so; Gerard de Narbon.

_Laf._ He was excellent, indeed, madam; the king very lately
spoke of him admiringly and mourningly; he was skilful enough
to have lived still, if knowledge could be set up against
mortality.

_Ber._ What is it, my good lord, the king languishes of?

_Laf._ A fistula, my lord."

[604] Dr. Bucknill's "Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare," p. 95.

[605] Singer's "Shakespeare," vol. iii. p. 225.

The account given of Helena's secret remedy and the king's reason for
rejecting it give, says Dr. Bucknill, an excellent idea of the state of
opinion with regard to the practice of physic in Shakespeare's time.

_Fit._ Formerly the term "rapture" was synonymous with a fit or trance.
The word is used by Brutus in "Coriolanus" (ii. 1):

"your prattling nurse
Into a rapture lets her baby cry
While she chats him."

Steevens quotes from the "Hospital for London's Follies" (1602), where
Gossip Luce says: "Your darling will weep itself into a rapture, if you
take not good heed."[606]

[606] See Singer's "Shakespeare," vol. vii. p. 347.

_Gold._ It was a long-prevailing opinion that a solution of gold had
great medicinal virtues, and that the incorruptibility of the metal
might be communicated to a body impregnated with it. Thus, in "2 Henry
IV." (iv. 4), Prince Henry, in the course of his address to his father,
says:

"Coming to look on you, thinking you dead,
And dead almost, my liege, to think you were,
I spake unto this crown, as having sense,
And thus upbraided it: 'The care on thee depending
Hath fed upon the body of my father;
Therefore, thou, best of gold, art worst of gold;
Other, less fine in carat, is more precious,
Preserving life in medicine potable.'"

Potable gold was one of the panaceas of ancient quacks. In John Wight's
translation of the "Sec