ABSTRACT
From the early 1520s, guaiacum wood was considered the most efficient pox treatment in all three Augsburg hospitals. Every new inmate was prophylactically ‘laid into the wood’.1 According to medical opinion, guaiacum’s primary and secondary qualities made it particularly suited to expelling the acid, cold-wet morbid matter from the poxed body, regardless of its individual complexion.2 Guaiacum warmed and dried the elemental bodily fluids and made them thin and liquid, the barber-surgeon Joseph Schmid proclaimed. Administered as a hot potion it stimulated perspiration, thus allowing the morbid pox matter to be conveyed naturally out of the body.3
