[In the essay that follows, Fox examines the context and structure of Henryson's lesser-known “Sum Practysis of Medecyne.”]

On folios 141^v-2^v of the Bannatyne MS, which was completed in 1568, there exists a curious and cryptic poem which carries the title, Sum practysis of medecyne, and the colophon, “quod Maister robert Henrysone.”¹ I would like to make here some suggestions about the tradition behind this poem, and about the poem's structure: it seems to me, on the one hand, that the disreputable genre Henryson was working in has some pedigree; and, on the other hand, that although the poem is certainly filled with puzzles, its overall structure is clearer than has been recognized.

The poem has been described as “a parody of the prescriptions of contemporary apothecaries,”² which is accurate enough as far as it goes. Or one can find a loose historical context for the poem by relating it to the tradition of satire against physicians, which was common enough in antiquity and in the middle ages, while one can also show an ironic relationship between this poem and a subliterary genre, the versified medical prescriptions which sometimes occur in Middle English.³ More precisely, however, Henryson's poem belongs to a tradition of medical burlesque which is characterized by a concatenation of medical, or pseudo-medical, terms. The closest analogues to “Sum Practysis” are the French herberies, parodies of a quack's promotional speech. Rutebeuf's Dit de l'Herberie, for instance, the most famous of these works, has similar self-praise of the speaker's medical skill, a similar jerky and hectoring style, and similarly detailed, scatological, and implausible prescriptions.⁴ Closely related to the herberies are the scenes in some French religious and secular plays in which a comic apothecary or physician delivers a monologue or parade extolling his drugs.⁵

There do not seem to be any surviving Middle English examples of the herberie proper, although one can find some partial analogues. In the Canterbury Tales, for instance, there is the Pardoner's sales talk, the use of technical jargon in the Canon's Yeoman's Tale, and the mocking lines of the Host to the Physician, “thyne urynals and thy jurdones, / Thyn ypocras, and eek thy galiones …” (VI, 305-6). There are, however, at least two burlesque prescriptions in verse. One is the fifteenth-century poem, “For a man þat is almost blynd,” which has the manuscript title, “A good medycyn for sor eyen.”⁶ This short poem, like “Sum Practysis,” suggests some violently inappropriate remedies: the patient is told to “go barhed all day ageyn þe wynd,” then, at evening, to go into a smoky house, and finally to fill his eyes full of brimstone and soap. The other is a poem entitled, “A good medesyn yff a mayd have lost her madened to make her a mayd ageyn,” which begins, “Yff a ȝong woman had a c. men take, / I can her ageyne a mayd make.”⁷ The ingredients are appropriately impossible, and some of them resemble Henryson's, such as “the kreke of a henne” (cf. Henryson's “thre crawis of þe cok”) and “the neyȝyng of a mere” (cf. Henryson's “The gant [‘yawn’] of ane gray meir”).

In English plays, on the other hand, there are scenes of medical burlesque which are parallel to the French parades. The most famous example is in John Heywood's The Four PP, which was written in the 1520's, and so is later than Henryson's poem, which was perhaps written ca. 1475. But it should be noted that Heywood, who was certainly not likely to have been acquainted with “Sum Practysis,” makes his Poticary use jargon very like Henryson's: “diapompholicus … diosfialios, / Diagalanga … diospoliticon.”⁸ A few medical burlesques can be found in earlier English plays: the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, for instance, which is roughly contemporary with Henryson's poem, contains a quack who gives details of a prescription, and the quack's servant, who proclaims his master's powers.⁹ And in the Chester Adoration of the Shepherds the shepherds boast of their skill in doctoring sheep, and name their specifics.¹⁰

It is probably safe to presume, then, that Henryson was acquainted with a tradition in which names of drugs, or their ingredients, were strung together for comic purposes. But his poem also seems to have some specifically Scottish roots. A hint of the tradition Henryson is working in is given by the fact that he uses the standard Scots thirteen-line alliterative stanza with a wheel. In late fifteenth-century Scotland this stanza was apparently being restricted more and more to humorous verse. Holland's Buke of the Howlat (ca. 1450) and Rauf Coilȝear (before 1500) are both partly humorous; “Kynd Kittok” (before 1508) and “The Gyre Carling” (before 1565) are both, like “Sum Practysis,” grotesqueries.¹¹ In the sixteenth century, this stanza seems to have been used particularly for flytings and humorous abuse. Douglas's only attempt at alliterative verse, the prologue to the eighth book of his Aeneid, a humorous diatribe on the times, is in this stanza, as is part of the Flyting of Montgomerie and Polwart.¹² James VI and I quotes a stanza of this latter poem to illustrate his rule, “For flyting, or Inuectiues, vse this kynde of verse following, callit Rouncefallis or Tumbling verse.”¹³ Although “Sum Practysis” is, strictly speaking, not a flyting but a dramatic monologue in which the speaker is satirized, it is cast in the form of a flyting, since Henryson pretends that the quack is replying contemptuously to some abusive verses which have been directed against him.

Henryson's poem, then, is related by its metre both to a tradition of grotesqueries and to a tradition of flytings. It seems likely, in addition, that there existed in Henryson's time a specifically Scottish tradition of humorous medical poems. The evidence for such a tradition comes only from poems probably later than “Sum Practysis,” but this is not surprising, since presumably the great bulk of fifteenth-century humorous Scots verse has been lost. There are a variety of sixteenth-century works which provide partial parallels to Henryson's poem, and it is unlikely that they all stem only from Henryson. “Lord Fergus's Gaist” (Bannatyne MS, fols. 114^r-5^r), a burlesque of the conjuring of a ghost, has a recipe for the peculiar items necessary to the conjuration; Polwart's “Medecine to Mountgoumry” (in the Flyting of Montgomerie and Polwart) has some highly improbable medical advice (“Tak þe thre byttis of ane ill hour”); there are some strange prescriptions in Robert Sempill's satire on Adamson;¹⁴ Dunbar gives a description of a quack's practices in “The Fenyeit Freir of Tungland”; and “the cursing of Schir Iohine rowlis Vpoun the steilaris of his fowlis” (Bannatyne MS, fols. 104^v-7^r) contains a formidable list of diseases, although the remedies are absent.

It is easier to find a historical context for “Sum Practysis” than to unravel its sense: on the one hand, the meaning of some of Henryson's slang and technical terms has been lost; on the other hand, the text in the Bannatyne MS seems corrupt—the differences between the various texts of Dunbar's and of Montgomerie's Flytings suggest that poems of this type, with a difficult vocabulary, could easily suffer major scribal corruption. But an attempt to unravel it seems worth making: the humor of the poem comes, I think, as much from its basic tidiness as from its apparent gibberish.

The first two stanzas are essentially clear, though there are a few minor puzzles. The speaker is answering his antagonist, who, he says, has earlier written scurrilous verses mocking him and belittling his medical skill. The speaker, in his turn, mocks and belittles his opponent, then boasts of his own greatly superior medical skill, and finally says that he is sending his opponent, presumably as a proof of his skill, a sedull, a schedule or list of prescriptions. Each of the next four stanzas is devoted to a single prescription: Henryson's method is shown most clearly in the first of them.

                                                                      Dia culcakit
Cape cuk maid, and crop the colleraige—
Ane medecyne for þe maw, and ȝe cowth mak it—
With sueit satlingis and sowrokis, the sop of þe sege,
The crud of my culome, with ȝour teith crakit,
Lawrean and linget seid and the luffage,
The hair of the hurcheoun nocht half deill hakkit,
With þe snowt of ane selch, ane swelling to swage:
This cure is callit in our craft dia culcakkit.
Put all thir in ane pan with pepper and pik,
Syne s[i]tt in to this,
The count of ane cow kis;
Is nocht bettir, I wis,
For þe collik.

To venture a tentative translation: “Befouled-buttock medicine: Take excrement [?], and pluck water pepper—this is a medicine for the stomach, if [or and] you could [or did] make it—together with sweet wine-dregs [?] and sorrel, sage-juice, the congealed matter of my buttocks, cracked with your teeth, laurel and linseed and lovage, hedgehog hair only partly chopped, together with the snout of a seal, in order to assuage the swelling: this medicine is called, in our science, ‘dia culcakkit.’ Put all these in a pan, with pepper and pitch, then sit in it and kiss the genitalia of a cow; there is nothing better, indeed, for colic.”

The scatology of this would have been more acceptable to Henryson's first audience than to us—excrement seems to be a primary source of Middle Scots humor—but this is a prescription sufficiently revolting in any age. The point of the stanza, however, is that it is also a close and clever parody of the usual prescriptions. The opening Cape (imperative of Latin capere) is a proper beginning for a prescription; the plants named were all, at times, used medicinally. But the effects of the medicine, if taken as directed, would obviously be disastrous. The nature of colleraige is shown by its etymology (French cul + rage) and by its English name, arsesmart. Coarsely chopped hedgehog hair would of course have a similar effect, and yet this ingredient is not pure fantasy: hedgehog grease, at least, was sometimes used as a medicinal ingredient.¹⁵ In some cases, there is a link between a detail of the prescription and the usual treatment for colic. A seal's snout is a sufficiently improbable ingredient, but there was apparently a traditional connection between seals and colic: see the fourteenth-century recommendation, “tak and make the a girdil of seel skyn, and whil thu weres hit aboute thi body thu sal noght have collicam passionem.”¹⁶ The method of application seems unorthodox, and yet according to a fifteenth-century prescription, a treatment for “Collica passio” is to “sit in a ffatt of hote water vp to the navyll.”¹⁷

The next three stanzas give three more prescriptions. The first of them is, I think, an aphrodisiac.¹⁸ Its name, Dia longum, which is otherwise obscure, may, then, have a priapic meaning.¹⁹ This medicine contains, together with such impalpable ingredients as “the claik of ane gus,” a dram of a drake's penis, and is prepared by being steeped in stale urine with red nettle seed.²⁰ Since it is to be used as a bath for the testicles,²¹ one is inclined to believe the final endorsement of it: “Is nocht bettir, be God, / To latt ȝow to sleip” (“there is nothing better, by God, to hinder you from sleeping”).²²

In the next stanza, everything about the prescription is clear except for its purpose. It seems possible, however, that the last two lines, “For till fle awaye fon / Quhair fulis ar fundin,” should be translated, “To put to flight folly, where fools are found.”²³ The medicine is so powerful, and so impossible—it contains, inter alia, seven sobs of a seal, and a limpet's ear—that it can accomplish what is notoriously impossible, and separate the fool from his folly (“Though thou shouldst bray a fool in the mortar … his folly would not be taken from him,” Prov. xxvii: 22).

The next, and last, prescription is one of the cleverest. It is announced as being “Gud for haising and hosting or heit at the hairt” (“Good for hoarseness and coughing or heartburn”); in the last line it is claimed only that it “Is gud for þe host” (“for the cough”). Some of the ingredients of this homoeopathic remedy are connected with the audible symptoms of hoarseness and coughing: a double handful of cuckoo fart, a pig's grunt,²⁴ and three crows of a cock. Other ingredients are designed to soothe a sore throat: three spoonfuls of pepper, and assorted types of dung mingled with mustard.

The last stanza of the poem contains the physician's final praise of his remedies, and his farewell. It ends with two lines which might be taken as an epitome of the whole poem:

It is ane mirk mirrour,
Ane vþir manis ers.
(“It is a dark mirror, another man's arse.”)

Not only the scatology of these lines, but also their tone and technique, are typical of the poem. The start is pompous and Polonius-like: one expects the proverb, “It is a mirk mirrour … ane other mans thocht,”²⁵ but then there is the sudden absurd substitution, and the pompous becomes ridiculous. The lines do not, however, turn into mere nonsense, since we are left with a vulgar but subtle insult: a man's face is what he normally sees in a mirror.²⁶

Notes

1. The Bannatyne Manuscript, ed. W. Tod Ritchie, Scottish Text Society, 2nd series 22, 23, 26, 3rd series 5 (Edinburgh, 1928-34). The poem is also printed, and variously commented on, in all the complete editions of Henryson. If the title is Henryson's, he probably used the earlier form, practik or prettik. The word may have the technical meaning, “modes of treatment”: cf. Dunbar, who says of a quack that “His practikis nevir war put to preif / But suddane deid, or grit mischief” (“The Fenyeit Freir of Tungland,” ll. 45-6). Although the poem is very different in form and tone from Henryson's other work, there seems to be no good reason to question its authenticity, especially since the Middle Scots poets commonly wrote in a variety of genres. The attributions in the Bannatyne MS are notoriously inaccurate, however, so Henryson's authorship should be taken as a probability rather than a certain fact.

2. A. M. Kinghorn, “The Minor Poems of Robert Henryson,” Studies in Scottish Literature, III (1965), 37.

3. For versified prescriptions see the long collection of prescriptions in couplets, Brown-Robbins Index, No. 1408, which exists in various forms, or the poems on pp. 73-80 of Secular Lyrics of the XIVth and XVth Centuries, ed. R. H. Robbins, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1955). Such poems were known in Scotland: a version of Lydgate's “Dietary” is in the Bannatyne MS (fol. 73^r-4^r), and see also the “preceptis of medecyne” on fol. 72^r-3^r. The relationship of Henryson's poem to both the tradition of medical satire and the genre of versified prescriptions is discussed in Ian Jamieson's dissertation, The Poetry of Robert Henryson: A Study of the Use of Source Material (University of Edinburgh, 1964), pp. 301-13.

4. The herberies are collected in Edmond Faral, Mimes français du XIII^e siècle (Paris, 1910), pp. 55-79. Rutebeuf's poem is translated and discussed in Edward B. Ham, “The Rutebeuf Guide for Mediaeval Salescraft,” SP, XLVII (1950), 20-34.

5. See P. Abrahams, “The Mercator-scenes in Mediaeval French Passion-plays,” Medium Ævum, III (1934), 112-23.

6. Printed in Secular Lyrics of the XIVth and XVth Centuries, p. 102, and in Medieval English Lyrics, ed. R. T. Davies (London, 1963), p. 235.

7. Written, perhaps ca. 1520, on the flyleaf of a copy of Caxton's Mirrour of the World, and printed in Reliquiae Antiquae, ed. T. Wright and J. O. Halliwell, I (London, 1845), 250-1. Wright and Halliwell also print (p. 325) a 1671 burlesque prescription in verse.

8. The Dramatic Writings of John Heywood, ed. John S. Farmer (London, 1905), pp. 46-7. Heywood was probably influenced here directly by French drama: see Ian Maxwell, French Farce and John Heywood (Melbourne, 1946), pp. 70-86.

9. In Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, ed. Norman Davis, EETS, Supplementary Text No. 1 (London, 1970), pp. 74-8, lines 525-652. For comic doctors in folk drama, see E. K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage (Oxford, 1903), I, 213.

10. The Chester Plays, ed. H. Deimling, I, EETS, E.S. 62 (London, 1892), pp. 132-40.

11. The Buke of the Howlat and Rauf Coilȝear are both printed in Scottish Alliterative Poems, ed. F. J. Amours, Scottish Text Society, 1st series 27, 38 (Edinburgh, 1892-7); “Kynd Kittok” and “The Gyre Carling” are in the Bannatyne MS, fols. 135^v-6^r and 136^v-7^r. A list of poems in this stanza is given in Scottish Alliterative Poems, pp. lxxxvi-vii. There are different varieties of the stanza: some poems have a bob, or short ninth line; in some, lines ten to twelve are longer than in “Sum Practysis.” See further Sir William Craigie, “The Scottish Alliterative Poems,” Proceedings of the British Academy, XXVIII (1942), 217-36.

12. The best text of the Flyting is in Poems of Alexander Montgomerie, Supplementary Volume, ed. George Stevenson, Scottish Text Society, 1st series 59 (Edinburgh, 1910).

13. Ane schort Treatise, conteining some revlis and cautelis to be obseruit and eschewit in Scottis Poesie, in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (London, 1904), I, 223.

14. In Satirical Poems of the Time of the Reformation, ed. James Cranstoun, I, Scottish Text Society, 1st series 20, 24 (Edinburgh, 1891). See especially pp. 362-5.

15. See Reliquiae Antiquae, I, 51. According to The New Sydenham Society's Lexicon of Medicine and the Allied Sciences, ed. Henry Power and Leonard W. Sedgwick (London, 1881-99), s.v. hedgehog, it was a specific for diarrhea.

16. Reliquiae Antiquae, I, 51.

17. A Leechbook or Collection of Medical Recipes of the Fifteenth Century, ed. Warren R. Dawson (London, 1934), p. 66, item 162. The editions of Henryson read sottin here; the MS reads probably sottin, but possibly sett in. It is not clear what sottin could mean in this context; sitt in (or sett in) is supported both by the nature of the medicine and by the parallel between these lines and lines 49-52 in the next stanza.

18. Another possibility is that it is an (ineffectual) medicine against insomnia.

19. The prefix dia-, used with the meaning “made of,” “consisting of,” was very common in pharmaceutical terms (see OED, dia-, pref.²), and hence was sometimes used as a separate word, with the meaning “medical preparation.”

20. According to Constantinus Africanus, nettle seed “strongly arouses desire”: he gives it as an ingredient of three of his aphrodisiacs. See Paul Delany, “Constantinus Africanus' De Coitu: A Translation,” Chaucer Review, IV (1970), 63-5.

21. This method of application was used especially for aphrodisiacs. Constantinus Africanus specifies that three of his aphrodisiacs (one of which contains nettle seed, another of which is an ointment made from large black ants and elder-oil) be used to anoint the testicles (tr. P. Delany, pp. 64-5). Otherwise I have noted this method of treatment only in a hangover remedy suggested by John of Gaddesden: see H. P. Cholmeley, John of Gaddesden and the Rosa Medicinae (Oxford, 1912), p. 53.

22. Latt can mean either “cause” or “hinder,” but in a construction with to and the infinitive it normally means the latter. See The Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST), s.v. let, v., 1b.

23. Either fon or son is a possible reading of the MS. Henryson may have used fon as an abstract noun, “folly”: see his Fables, 1008, and DOST, s.v. fon.

24. Henryson's editors read, in line 70, “the guse of ane gryce,” but the MS can be interpreted as reading either gufe or guse. The meaning of the latter reading is not clear, but gufe, “the snort, snuffle, or grunt of a pig,” makes excellent sense. See Lindsay's Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, 4288, and Modern Scots guff.

25. The James Carmichaell Collection of Proverbs in Scots, ed. M. L. Anderson (Edinburgh, 1957), No. 949. The usual form of the proverb is “… ane other manis mynd.” See M. P. Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1950), M991.

26. Cf. Skelton, in the Poems Against Garnesche (Poems, ed. P. Henderson, 3rd ed. [London, 1959], p. 160):

    Behold thyself, and thou mayst see;
    Thou shalt behold nowhere a worse,
    Thy mirror may be the devil's arse.

    Though I am hesitant about this, there may also be a reference in Henryson's lines to the practice of scrutinizing a patient's excrement for the purpose of diagnosis. See O. Cameron Gruner, A Treatise on the Canon of Medicine of Avicenna (London, 1930), pp. 353-5.