It appears that “bochet” referred to a medicinal syrup. Its meaning has changed over time
I had a few yeeres agoe a Gentleman to my patient, whose grand support for 3 or 4 yeeres, as I remember (together with a milke dyet and bochet) was a good dose (sometimes the quantity of a nutmeg sometimes two or more) of the following Electuary (prescribed him I thinke by Dr. Short) usually at bedtime when he needed it, but indeed at any other time when much inclined to coughing.
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Common beverages and soups for the sick as recommended by an
elderly Parisian to his inexperienced young wife in the late fourteenth
century, such as tizanne doulce, consisting of liquorice, barley, and figs
boiled in water and strained, bochet that had a base of fermented honey,
Flemish caudle that required four egg yolks and white wine.
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Sassafras (25, 43) Sassafras albidum (Nutt.) Nees.
"... A decoction of Sassafras with sugar was sold in coffee-houses at the end of the last century, under the name of Bochet ..." (31).
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Depurative Syrup of Bochet. R.
Sarsaparilla, sassafras, China. root, guiacum, Senna, of each 3xxxii; boil twice in a sufficient quantity of water, mix the two decoctions, and reduce by boiling to two gallons, and add of sugar lbx; honey, lbx; tincture of iodine, 3xxxii; make into a syrup.
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OLD FRENCH.
XV. "Item, vous est bon quand abondes au fleumes, au quant sentes la teste pesante, gargarisies au matin, une fois ou deus la sepmaine, une culiere de sirop de sticados avec deus culierees de bochet moiennement chaufees.”
TRANSLATION.
When full of phlegm or heavy-headed it is good to gargle two or three times a week, in the morning, with the syrup of lavender, one or two teaspoonfuls slightly warmed of bochet.
Notes.
1. Sticados is the name given lavender by the people of the Middle Ages. Galen, in his "Eighth Book of Simple Medicines," declares stechas to be an astringent. According to Mesue, the remedy "drives away the phlegms of melancholy, strengthens the brain and all the openings of the senses.”
2. Bochet was a variety of sudorific wood (such as guaiac, china wood, sassafras, sareaparilla, etc.). It served as an ordinary drink in cases of rheumatism, sciatica, scrofula, and in all those varieties of disease in which it is necessary to favorize sweating.
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