was fond of dabbling with medicine. In Brewer’s history of his reign,
referring to the years 1516-18, we are told:--
“The amusements of court were diversified by hunting and out-door
sports in the morning; in the afternoon by Memo’s music, by the
consecration and distribution of cramp rings, or the invention of
plasters and compounding of medicines, an occupation in which the King
took unusual pleasure.”
In the British Museum among the Sloane MSS. there is one numbered 1047,
entitled Dr. Butt’s Diary, which records many of these pharmaceutical
achievements of the monarch. Dr. Butt was the King’s physician and
was no doubt his guide in these experiments. Dr. Butt, or Butts,
is referred to in Strype’s “Life of Cranmer” and in Shakespeare’s
“Henry VIII.” Many of the liniments and cataplasms formulated are for
excoriations or ulcers in the legs, a disease, as Dr. Brewer notes,
“common in those days, and from which the King himself suffered.”
Among the contents of the Diary are “The King’s Majesty’s own Plaster.”
It is described as a plaster devised by the king to heal ulcers
without pain. It was a compound of pearls and guaiacum wood. There are
in the manuscript formulas for other plasters “devised by the King
at Greenwich and made at Westminster” to heal excoriations, to heal
swellings in the ankles, one for my lady Anne of Cleves “to mollify
and resolve, comfort and cease pain of cold and windy causes”; and an
ointment to cool and “let” (prevent) inflammations, and take away itch.
Other formulas by Dr. Butt himself, and by other contemporary doctors,
are comprised in this Diary.
Sir H. Halford, in an article “On the Deaths of Some Eminent Persons,”
printed in 1835, says of Henry VIII, who died of dropsy at the age of
56, that he was “a great dabbler in physic, and offered medical advice
on all occasions which presented themselves, and also made up the
medicines.”