On the variety of beers and their medicinal powers

THE older the barley beer, the purer and healthier it is, and if it is drunk during the siege of a castle, it marvellously relieves and cures the intercutaneous disease that swells into a tumour, and also removes bladder stones. When I was trapped inside the beleaguered Swedish royal city of Stockholm in 1520,¹¹ drank this very old beer and for several mornings in a row saw in the chamber pot some little stones which had been ejected without pain or injury.