_Of hardening Medicines._
Galen in _Lib. 5. de Simple, Med. Facult. Cap. 10._ determines
hardening medicines to be cold and moist, and he brings some arguments
to prove it, against which other physicians contest.
I shall not here stand to quote the dispute, only take notice, that
if softening medicines be hot and moist (as we shewed even now) then
hardening medicines must needs be cold and dry, because they are
contrary to them.
The universal course of nature will prove it, for dryness and moisture
are passive qualities, neither can extremeties consist in moisture as
you may know, if you do but consider that dryness is not attributed to
the air, nor water, but to the fire, and earth.
2. The thing to be _congealed_ must needs be moist, therefore the
medicine _congealing_ must of necessity be dry, for if cold be joined
with dryness, it contracts the pores, that so the humours cannot be
scattered.
Yet you must observe a difference between medicines drying, making
thick, hardening, and congealing, of which differences, a few words
will not do amiss.
1. Such medicines are said to dry, which draw out, or drink up the
moisture, as a spunge drinks up water.
2. Such medicines are said to make thick, as do not consume the
moisture, but add dryness to it, as you make syrups into a thick
electuary by adding powders to them.
3. Such as congeal, neither draw out the moisture, nor make it thick
by adding dryness to it, but contract it by vehement cold, as water is
frozen into ice.
4. Hardness differs from all these, for the parts of the body swell,
and are filled with flegmatic humours, or melancholy blood, which at
last grows hard.
That you may clearly understand this, observe but these two things.
1. What it is which worketh.
2. What it worketh upon.
That which worketh is outwardly cold. That which is wrought upon, is a
certain thickness and dryness, of humours, for if the humour were fluid
as water is, it might properly be said to be congealed by cold, but not
so properly hardened. Thus you see cold and dryness to be the cause of
hardening. This hardening being so far from being useful, that it is
obnoxious to the body of man. I pass it without more words. I suppose
when _Galen_ wrote of hardening medicines, he intended such as make
thick, and therefore amongst them he reckons up Fleawort, Purslain,
Houseleek, and the like, which assuage the heat of the humours in
swellings, and stops subtil and sharp defluxions upon the lungs; but of
these more anon.