BREAD, in Medicine. Besides the alimentary, bread has also medical qualities.—Decoctions, creams, and jellies of bread, are directed in some dispensaries. Bread
carefully toasted, and infused or lightly boiled in water, imparts a deep colour, and a sufficiently agreeable restringent taste. This liquor, taken as common drink, has done good service in a weak lax state of the stomach and intestines; and in bilious vomiting and purgine, or the cholera morbus: examples are related in the Edinburgh essays of several cases of this kind cured by it, without the use of any other medicine.—In Westphalia there is a very coarse bread eaten, which still retains the opprobrious name given it by a French traveller of Bonpournikel, "good for his horse Nickel." It is the same with what the Romans called panis furfuraceus, or panis impurus, from its not being cleansed from the husk; and panis ater, from the blackness of its colour: though we learn from Pliny, that the Romans for 300 years knew no other bread. The Germans * make * Heffman's two sorts of waters by distillation from this bread; the Obs. Chem. one with, the other without, the addition of a spirituous liquor: to both which great virtues are ascribed. That without any thing spirituous, is made out of the juice of craw-fish, may-dew, rose-water, nutmegs, and saf-fron, distilled from a large quantity of this bread. This is esteemed a great restorative, and given in hectic habits. The other is distilled from this bread and Rhenish wine, with nutmegs and cinnamon. This is given in all the disorders of the stomach, vomiting, loss of appetite, and other complaints of the same kind: and besides these, there is a spirit distilled from it by the retort in the dry way, which, when separated from its fetid oil, is esteemed a powerful sudorific, and very valuable medicine in removing impurities of the blood.
Bread is also medicinal, applied externally, as is vulgarly known *. Mr Boyle assures us he drew a menstruum from bread stronger than aquafortis, and which would act even upon glass itself †.