The diseases prescribed for are plague, small-pox, fevers, king’s evil, insanity, falling-sickness, and the like; with such injuries as broken bones, dislocations, and burning with gunpowder.  The remedies are of three kinds:  simples, such as St. John’s wort, Clown’s all-heal, elder, parsley, maidenhair, mineral drugs, such as lime, saltpetre, Armenian bole, crocus metallorum, or sulphuret of antimony; and thaumaturgic or mystical, of which the chief is, “My black powder against the plague, small-pox; purples, all sorts of feavers; Poyson; either, by Way of Prevention or after Infection.”  This marvellous remedy was made by putting live toads into an earthen pot so as to half fill it, and baking and burning them “in the open ayre, not in an house,”—­concerning which latter possibility I suspect Madam Winthrop would have had something to say,—­until they could be reduced by pounding, first into a brown, and then into a black, powder.  Blood-letting in some inflammations, fasting in the early stage of fevers, and some of those peremptory drugs with which most of us have been well acquainted in our time, the infragrant memories of which I will not pursue beyond this slight allusion, are among his remedies.

The Winthrops, to one of whom Dr. Stafford’s directions were addressed, were the medical as well as the political advisers of their fellow-citizens for three or four successive generations.  One of them, Governor John of Connecticut, practised so extensively, that, but for his more distinguished title in the State, he would have been remembered as the Doctor.  The fact that he practised in another colony, for the most part, makes little difference in the value of the records we have of his medical experience, which have fortunately been preserved, and give a very fair idea, in all probability, of the way in which patients were treated in Massachusetts, when they fell into intelligent and somewhat educated hands, a little after the middle of the seventeenth century: 

I have before me, while writing, a manuscript collection of the medical cases treated by him, and recorded at the time in his own hand, which has been intrusted to me by our President, his descendant.

They are generally marked Hartford, and extend from the year 1657 to 1669.  From these, manuscripts, and from the letters printed in the Winthrop Papers published by our Society, I have endeavored to obtain some idea of the practice of Governor John Winthrop, Junior.  The learned eye of Mr. Pulsifer would have helped me, no doubt, as it has done in other cases; but I have ventured this time to attempt finding my own way among the hieroglyphics of these old pages.  By careful comparison of many prescriptions, and by the aid of Schroder, Salmon, Culpeper, and other old compilers, I have deciphered many of his difficult paragraphs with their mysterious recipes.