CHAPTER V.

_Of Medicines appropriated to the liver._

Be pleased to take these under the name of _Hepatics_, for that is the usual name physicians give them, and these also are of three sorts.

1. Some the liver is delighted in. 2. Others strengthen it. 3. Others help its vices.

The palate is the seat of taste, and its office is to judge what food is agreeable to the stomach, and what not, by that is both the quality and quantity of food for the stomach discerned: the very same office the _meseraik_ veins perform to the liver.

Sometimes such food pleases the palate which the liver likes not (but not often) and therefore the _meseraik_ veins refuse it, and that is the reason some few men fancy such food as makes them sick after the eating thereof.

1. The liver is delighted exceedingly with sweet things, draws them greedily, and digests them as swiftly, and that is the reason honey is so soon turned into choler.

2. Such medicines strengthen the liver, as (being appropriated to it) very gently bind, for seeing the office of the liver is to concoct, it needs some adstriction, that so both the heat and the humour to be concocted may be stayed, that so the one slip not away, nor the other be scattered.

Yet do not hepatical medicines require so great a binding faculty as stomachicals do, because the passages of the stomach are more open than those of the liver by which it either takes in chyle, or sends out blood to the rest of the body, therefore medicines that are very binding are hurtful to the liver, and either cause obstructions, or hinder the distribution of the blood, or both.

And thus much for the liver, the office of which is to concoct chyle, (which is a white substance the stomach digests the food into) into blood, and distributes it, by the veins, to every part of the body, whereby the body is nourished, and decaying flesh restored.