- The lurking evil from the blood expel,
- And throw it on the surface: There in spots [270]
- Which cause no pain, and scant ichor1 yield,
- It chiefly breaks about the arms and hips,
- A virulent contagion!—When no more
- Round knobby spots deform, but the disease
- Seems at a pause: Then let the learned leach [275]
- Give, in due dose, live-silver2 from the mine;
- Till copious spitting the whole taint exhaust.—
- Nor thou repine, tho’ half-way round the sun,
- This globe, her annual progress shall absolve;
- Ere, clear’d, thy slave from all infection shine. [280]
- Nor then be confident; successive crops
- Of defaedations3 oft will spot the skin:
- These thou, with turpentine and guaiac pods,
- Reduc’d by coction to a wholesome draught,
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Total remove, and give the blood its balm. [285]
- SAY, as this malady but once infests
- The sons of Guinea, might not skill ingraft
- (Thus, the small-pox are happily convey’d;)
- This ailment early to thy Negroe-train?4
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In Greek mythology, the ethereal fluid believed to have flowed through the veins of the gods. Here, Grainger means fluid from yaw lesions. ↩︎
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Mercury (or quicksilver) when taken as mercuric chloride (calomel). An important purgative in eighteenth-century medicine. Could also cause excessive salivation. ↩︎
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The action of contaminating, polluting, or infecting something, especially the blood or skin. In this case, the periodic eruption of yaws sores. ↩︎
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Because yaws, like smallpox, seemed to infect a person only once in life, Grainger wonders whether inoculation might not be a good way to fight yaws. Popularized in Europe and the Americas as a treatment against smallpox in 1722, inoculation involved puncturing the skin of a healthy individual and deliberately infecting him or her with pustulent matter from a live smallpox sore. This procedure was extremely dangerous by modern standards because the virus was not attenuated and the inoculee came down with a case of smallpox. Inoculation nevertheless had a much lower rate of mortality than being infected by smallpox naturally. ↩︎