records many of these pharmaceutical achievements of the monarch. Dr. Butt was the King's physician and was no doubt his guide in these experiments. Dr. Butt, or Butts, is referred to in Strype's "Life of Cranmer" and in Shakespeare's "Henry VIII." Many of the liniments and cataplasms formulated are for excoriations or ulcers in the legs, a disease, as Dr. Brewer notes, "common in those days, and from which the King himself suffered."
Among the contents of the Diary are "The King's Majesty's own Plaster." It is described as a plaster devised by the king to heal ulcers without pain. It was a compound of pearls and guaiacum wood. There are in the manuscript formulas for other plasters "devised by the King at Greenwich and made at Westminster" to heal excoriations, to heal swellings in the ankles, one for my lady Anne of Cleves "to mollify and resolve, comfort and cease pain of cold and windy causes"; and an ointment to cool and "let" (prevent) inflammations, and take away itch.
Other formulas by Dr. Butt himself, and by other contemporary doctors, are comprised in this Diary.
Sir H. Halford, in an article "On the Deaths of Some Eminent Persons," printed in 1835, says of Henry VIII, who died of dropsy at the age of 56, that he was "a great dabbler in physic, and offered medical advice on all occasions which presented themselves, and also made up the medicines."
Queen Elizabeth of England
appears to have been an amateur prescriber. Etmuller states that she sent a formula for a "cephalica-cardiac medicine" to the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II,
