DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.11638#0233
AND LOW£R EGVPT. 0,11
slight retchings. I have sometimes administered,
with fear and trembling, very powerful medicines,
which made no more impression on my patients
than if they had drank a glass of water. The
monks for the propagation of the faith, who
maintained themselves in those countries by the
practice of physic, successfully made use of a
purge for the natives, which they might have ad-
ministered with as much propriety to horses, and
which they compounded of aloes, the coloquin-
tida, and a quantity of gum. Of these they
formed pills, and a drachm was a dose.
The leaves of the senna, a plant indigenous in
the southern extremity of Egypt, are there taken
in large quantities without inconvenience, and
almost without effect. Perhaps fresh senna has
not the same purgative virtues as it has when
dried; like the manna, which is used as a substi-
tute for sugar in victuals and pastry at Kurdistan,
D'mrbekir, lspaha?7, and other countries of Asia,
and of which the inhabitants consume a great
deal without being purged *.
I have already said, that diseases which attack
even the sources of generation were very common
in Egypt. They have found their way to the most
remote corners of it. The monks cured them
* See a Description of Arabia by Niebuhr, p, 119.
p 2 very
slight retchings. I have sometimes administered,
with fear and trembling, very powerful medicines,
which made no more impression on my patients
than if they had drank a glass of water. The
monks for the propagation of the faith, who
maintained themselves in those countries by the
practice of physic, successfully made use of a
purge for the natives, which they might have ad-
ministered with as much propriety to horses, and
which they compounded of aloes, the coloquin-
tida, and a quantity of gum. Of these they
formed pills, and a drachm was a dose.
The leaves of the senna, a plant indigenous in
the southern extremity of Egypt, are there taken
in large quantities without inconvenience, and
almost without effect. Perhaps fresh senna has
not the same purgative virtues as it has when
dried; like the manna, which is used as a substi-
tute for sugar in victuals and pastry at Kurdistan,
D'mrbekir, lspaha?7, and other countries of Asia,
and of which the inhabitants consume a great
deal without being purged *.
I have already said, that diseases which attack
even the sources of generation were very common
in Egypt. They have found their way to the most
remote corners of it. The monks cured them
* See a Description of Arabia by Niebuhr, p, 119.
p 2 very