Rapidly dropping, quick to drop, more evil than the evil ones, more sapless than a dried-up bone, swifter than salt to melt away:

2 Pustules that rise upon the neck, pustules upon the shoulder-joints, pustules that, falling of themselves, spring up on every twofold limb:

3 I have expelled and banished all scrofula harboured in the head, and that which bores the breast-bone through, and that which settles in the sole.

4 Scrofula flies borne on by wings: it penetrates and holds the man. Here is the cure of either kind, the chronic and the transient.

5 We know thine origin, scrofula! know whence thou, scrofula, art born. How hast thou then struck this man here, him in whose house we give in God's name?