The Book of Great Value

This is a book on electuaries, beverages, powders, poultices, ointments, and the cloths called paplasia of medicine. It was written by Shabbetay the physician, surnamed Donnolo bar Avraham who left the town of Oria in order to teach the physicians of Israel how to prepare composed medicines according to the science of Israeli and Macedonian physicians and according to his own experience gained in the research of medical science and deep investigation of medicine for 40 years for God’s Name.

Wise and expert physicians should already know the spices, the medicinal tree resins, the oils and medicinal herbs, learning them well from the teaching of the sages and the instruction of the books and the ancients. They should discern and know whether the spices, the medicinal tree resins, the oils and medicinal herbs are pure and clean, without any adulteration, because those who sell them can adulterate them. They will know the spices and resins crushed in a mortar and passed through a sieve; the resins melted alone over fire and the resins melted over fire with honey or oil. Then they can start to prepare the drugs they want. The wise man should know too to select the honey that he needs for every beverage depending on whether it is fresh, extremely sweet, thick, greasy, has a good smell, dark or greenish red appearance, it is pure and clean.

He should inquire about the place where the honey comes from and from which herbs the bees have gathered the most in that place, because there are places where deadly herbs grow such as maddening herbs the cause purgation and vomiting. [ . . . ]

If the electuary is one of those that have balsam oil in, one should first add the oil to the spices in the mortar and mix it with a copper or wood pestle. Likewise, if the electuary is one of those in which one puts creamy and fresh galbanum or storax, melted and incorporated in a bit of honey, or dissolved and crushed tragacanth or the juice of the plant, or every melted, dissolved or liquid substance; first, mix that which has been dissolved or melted with the spices in and then pour the hot and boiled honey into them gradually until the beverage is smooth, being a medium paste, neither soft nor hard. The beverage is mashed with the honey, using the ladle in the mortar until the honey cools slightly. Then the physician puts the beverage in a clean jar with a good mature and smelling wine, a good grape wine or any grape liquor. [ . . . ]

If the physician wants to prepare an ointment to heat and to soften the veins, or for the ache in the bones that comes from cold, he will pick every hot and good smelling herb and crush them when they are still fresh and cook them well in a cauldron with water on the fire until all the herb’s strength has been extracted by the water. Then he takes it from the fire and wrings it out in a cloth gradually, with the force of the hand until all the hot water is wrung out, and the water is collected in a clean vessel. The cooked and drained herbs are thrown out and he puts this water in the cauldron again. Then he puts all the hot fats, marrows and sebum from animals, poultries and cattle, butter and cow bile and he melts sebum and marrow apart and strains it through a vessel with holes, namely a copper sieve, and so he adds them with the fats and the biles into this water and boils them together until all the water is completely evaporated. The sign for knowing the water is evaporated is: when you hear a noise of cooking like the noise a fish makes in a frying pan over the fire. Then you will know that water has evaporated. Then you take the cauldron off the fire and let it cool. Then squeeze the remaining sediments out of the sebum, the fat, the marrow, and the butter; while you are emptying the cauldron into another vessel, the sediments will be cleaned from the cauldron, and you will have a filter of this sediment to anoint ignorant people and commoners and for the pain in throat, neck, chest, loins, knees and even sore bone due to the humidity and cold. He puts the strained fats in the cauldron again and places it over the fire, then adds the melted wax in order to make it emulsify, becoming an ointment.

If the physician wants to add spices and resins to this ointment in order to increase its strength and usefulness with God’s help, like nard, saffron, costmary, pellytory and other drugs like them and resins like galbanum, terebinth, pine-resin, aloes, frankincense, mastic, myrrh, bdellium, serapinum, asafetida, that is silfium, amoniacum, opoponax, and other resins like them, then he crushes and grinds the dry ones apart and melts the resins on fire separately, and passes them through a copper sieve onto the oils. After this he removes wax, according to custom, and boils them together with melted and sifted resins and takes the cauldron with oils and resins off the fire and lets it rest until it is cool enough to touch. Then he gradually adds the drugs and the resins, finely ground and kneads and mixes well and doesn’t boil them but lets it rest until it becomes thick. Then he puts them in vessels, being a filter of medicine with the physician’s help.

And these are the herbs that were tried and tested by Shabbetay, the physician, to put them in ointments: birthwort herb and its root, and there are two kinds: round and long. You put there a handful of it and a big, white root of scilla, cut in little pieces; and asphodelus root, that is albuxun, and alirium root and colocynth root, called in Latin curcubita, root and leaves of cucumber, cedar root, that is cyperon yunqo radyṣy, black hellebore root rdyqla, bay leaves, that is lauro, and citron leaves, rue, sage, absinth, southernwood, savin, mugwort, tarmacon, all the kinds of hyssop, oregano, basil, pennyroyal that is qasula, horehound, that is its decoction, that is black hellebore, calamint that is calamenta, French lavender, mint that is idiozmum and simkryon, yarrow, of every one a handful, finely ground in a cauldron with water, twice the measurement of the herbs.