Ioannis Vuieri medicarum observationum rararum Liber I

crimes, not only regarding the injury to people, but also the waters and the lands. In Germany, across the Rhine, after the camps had been moved forward by Germanicus Caesar, there was a single spring of fresh water in the maritime tract. When this was drunk, within two years the teeth would fall out, and the joints in the knees would loosen. Physicians called it stomacace mouth-rot and sceletyrbe leg-disease. A plant was found to assist with this evil, which is called Britannica Great Water Dock; it is beneficial not only for the sinews and diseased mouths, but also against angina and serpents. It has oblong, black leaves and a black root. Its juice is expressed from the root as well. The Frisians, where the camps were, pointed it out. Among them and the neighboring maritime regions, especially those facing the North, that evil has raged until now. In recent years, however, it has successfully spread to neighboring territories where it was previously unheard of, whether due to a corrupt method of living or contagion, so that now it has become known to almost all of Lower Germany. Otherwise, it remains unknown in the vast kingdom of all Upper Germany, just as it is in Italy, France, and Spain. If by chance this plague is felt in any place in Asia or Africa, it will be either maritime or another location where there is a rare use of healthy water, or where the diet or air provides its fuel. Therefore, this disease is peculiar only to that tract, just as it is to the inhabitants of the Northern sea; it is by no means familiar to all parts of the world, like the rest of the pile of diseases. The Nabataeans indeed in happy Arabia, and the Romans arriving there, seem to have suffered from it, [in the time] of Augustus Caesar.