Corpus of Electronic Texts Edition
An Irish Materia Medica (Author: Tadhg Ó Cuinn)
subsection 191
191. Mercurialis: i.e. annual mercury; cold and wet in the first degree; it has a viscous character, and a softening virtue; it purges
p.583
the choleric humour from the liver and the intestines, in the first place, and the melancholic humour in the second place. If the juice of this herb be given raw with sugar, it will gently purge the aforesaid humours. When it is boiled, it loses the laxative virtue. If the same herb be boiled in butter or in pig lard, and pressed through a cloth and given as a salve, it will help with the cough and illness of the chest. If mercury be boiled in pig meat and the meat and the soup be eaten before the purgative is taken, it will soften the intestines and the internal passages, and make them smooth. If it be boiled in vinegar and drunk, it will expand the spleen, if it has been contracted by excess of the choleric humour. Item, boil the same herb in water and put pig lard, honey and salt into it, and administer it as a clyster, and this will relax the intestines comfortably and gently.