What is "cataplasms"

Usage examples of "cataplasms".

Pliny, inspired with as truly Roman horror of quackery as the elder Cato,--who declared that the Greek doctors had sworn to exterminate all barbarians, including the Romans, with their drugs, but is said to have physicked his own wife to death, notwithstanding,--Pliny says, in so many words, that the cerates and cataplasms, plasters, collyria, and antidotes, so abundant in his time, as in more recent days, were mere tricks to make money.