Word: forman
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...Forman refrain from physical ministrations, medical and otherwise. He invented a code word -halek-to record sexual relations with female patients. The word pops up with awesome regularity throughout the good doctor's case notes. The Dark Lady herself received his attentions. In his mid-50s, he was still haleking as often as three times a day, and the hundreds of casual adulteries confessed to by his clients suggest that Forman was not unusually randy. Rowse's exclamation, "What a free-for-all Elizabethan sex-life was!" is amply documented...
Purged Victims. The chief trouble the astrologer endured was relentless persecution by the Royal College of Physicians. The established doctors resented the healing business that Forman diverted from them. He had learned what little medicine he knew "under a hedge." Forman replied that he had kept up his practice in London during the plague of 1592-93, when most respectable physicians had fled to the country. Rowse takes Forman's side. Judging from surviving records, the untutored amateur seems to have wreaked less carnage than the certified practitioners who bled or purged victims at the drop of a symptom...
...Forman instead brewed up harmless-sounding potions, including one made of "sage, marjoram, elderbuds, ashbuds, berberis, liquorice, aniseed, aloes and juniper berries." He seems to have reassured people more than he treated them, and that was probably for the best, given the primitive state of medical science and the appalling maladies of the time. Confronted with a patient who "breeds worms in his nose of stinking sweet and venomous humor," Forman sensibly recommended a change in diet and frequent face washing...
Virgin Queen. Forman was an abysmally credulous soul. "If I sneeze," he wrote, "once at the left nostril after sunset, it means an unknown person is coming; if twice at the right nostril be fore sunrise, it means a friend coming speedily for physic, or some sick body...
Astrology, after all, eventually led to astronomy, just as alchemy (which For man also dabbled in) laid the ground work for chemistry and physics. Forman may have been foolish, but he was not a charlatan. The Elizabethan epoch was one of rich contradictions; it is impossible to comprehend that time merely by reading its high literary work. As Rowse shows, men like Marlowe, Jonson and Shakespeare transcend their age; Forman embodies...