The Governor employed a number of the simples dear to ancient women, —­elecampane and elder and wormwood and anise and the rest; but he also employed certain mineral remedies, which he almost always indicates by their ancient symbols, or by a name which should leave them a mystery to the vulgar.  I am now prepared to reveal the mystic secrets of the Governor’s beneficent art, which rendered so many good and great as well as so many poor and dependent people his debtors,—­at least, in their simple belief,—­for their 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.