Healths improvement: or, Rules comprizing and discovering the nature, method, and manner of preparing all sorts of food used in this nation. Written by that ever famous Thomas Muffett, Doctor in Physick: corrected and enlarged by Christopher Bennet, Doctor in Physick, and fellow of the Colledg of Physitians in London.

Mora.

Mulberies being black and fat (which is a signe of their full ripeness) are hot in the first degree, and moist in the second; fittest to be eaten before meat; because they easily pass from out the stomach to the guts, draw∣ing the other meat along with themselves: they please the stomach, procure losness of body and urine, nourish ••ound and clean bodies, though they corrupt in unclean stomachs; also they smoothen the harshness of the throate, quench thirst, delay choller, and cause no great, but yet a natural appetite to meat. They should be ga∣thered before Sun-rising, and given onely (as I said) to clean stomachs and before meat; for they will else cor∣rupt and swell us up, and drive us perhaps into some pu∣trified fever. They are fittest in Summer for young men, and such as abound with blood and choler.

Unripe Mulberies (which is discerned by their white∣ness

and redness) may be good to make medicins for ulcered throats and fluxes of the belly, but they deserve not the names of nourishments.

When Mulberies cannot be gotten, Blackberries or Dewberries may supply their room, to which Galen ascribeth the like vertues. This one thing let us note, omitted of all Herbarists of our latter age; that albeit a Mulbery Tree be called in Greek and Latin Morus, that is to say, a fool; yet her wisdome excelleth all other Trees in my judgement, because it never budeth till all sharp weather be clean gone, and then spredeth out her leaves more in a day, then all other Trees did in thirty before.

Notes

• Pis. de esc. & pot. ex Avicen∣na Aetio & Isa. aco Iudaeo.
• •• de alim. fac.