But Europeans ran from epidemics,
too (as in Boccaccio’s Decameron), and European medicine in
those days was generally useless. (Charles II’s doctors in the
1600s treated his fits with bleeding, cupping, emetics, laxatives,
enemas, blistering plasters, Spanish Fly, and more bleeding,
then plastered the soles of his feet with tar and pigeon dung,
gave him a bezoar [a concretion found in the stomach of a goat,
thought to neutralize any poison], and followed this up with
more bleeding. None of it worked.)引自 EXPANSIONS
