Among the strangest things ever used as medicine must be placed human skulls. In 1854, Mr. T. A. Trollope gave a short account in _Notes and Queries_ of a book by Dr. Cammillo Brunoni, published at Fabriano in 1726. It was entitled _Il Medico Poeta_ (the Physician a Poet), and gives an account "of the medical uses of human skulls." Dr. Brunoni informs us, says Mr. Trollope, that "all skulls are not of equal value. Indeed, those of persons who have died a natural death, are good for little or nothing. The _reason_ of this is, that the disease of which they died has consumed or dissipated the essential spirit! The skulls of murderers and bandits are particularly efficacious. And this is clearly because not only is the essential spirit of the cranium concentrated therein by the nature of their violent death, but also the force of it is increased by the long exposure to the atmosphere, occasioned by the heads of such persons being ordinarily placed on spikes over the gates of cities! Such skulls are used in various manners. Preparations of volatile salt, spirit, gelatine, essence, etc., are made from them, and are very useful in epilepsy and hoemorrhage. The notion soldiers have, that drinking out of a skull renders them invulnerable in battle, is a mere superstition, though respectable writers do maintain that such a practice is a proved preventive against scrofula."
This very curious book consists of a "poem in twelve cantos, or 'Capitoli,' as from the fifteenth century downwards it was the Italian fashion to call them, on the physical poet--a sort of medical _ars poetica_; and followed by a hundred and seventy-two sonnets on all diseases, drugs, parts of the body, functions of them, and curative means. Each sonnet is printed on one page, while that opposite is occupied by a compendious account in prose of the subject in hand. We have a sonnet on the stomach-ache, a sonnet on apoplexy, a sonnet on purges, another on blisters, and many others on far less mentionable subjects. The author's poetical view of the action of a black-dose compares it to that of a tidy and active housemaid, who, having swept together all the dirt in the room, throws it out of the window. Mystic virtues are attributed to a variety of substances, animal, vegetable, and mineral."