Section III — Of the Propriety or Operation of Medicines
Chapter I Of Emolient Medicines
The various mixtures of heat, cold, dryness, and moisture in simples, must of necessity produce variety of faculties, and operations in them, which now we come to treat of, beginning first at emolients.
What is hard, and what is soft, most men know, but few are able to express. Phylosophers define that to be hard which yields not to touching, and soft to be the contrary. An emolient, or softening medicine is one which reduceth a hard substance to its proper temperature.
But to leave phylosophy, and keep to physic: physicians describe hardness to be two-fold.
1. A distention or stretching of a part by too much fulness.
2. Thick humours which are destitute of heat, growing hard in that part of the body into which they flow.
So many properties then ought emolient medicines to have, viz. To moisten what is dry, to discuss what is stretched, to warm what is congealed by cold; yet properly, that only is said to mollify which reduceth a hard substance to its proper temperature.
Dryness and thickness of humours being the cause of hardness, emolient medicines must of necessity be hot and moist; and although you may peradventure find some of them dry in the second or third degrees, yet must this dryness be tempered and qualified with heat and moisture, for reason will tell you that dry medicines make hard parts harder.
Mollifying medicines are known, 1. by their taste, 2. by their feeling.
1. In taste, they are near unto sweat, but fat and oily; they are neither sharp, nor austere, nor sour, nor salt, neither do they manifest either binding, or vehement heat, or cold to be in them.
2. In feeling you can perceive no roughness, neither do they stick to your fingers like Birdlime, for they ought to penetrate the parts to be mollified, and therefore many times if occasion be, are cutting medicines mixed with them.