of people who like to do as their fathers did before them.
The vulgar superstitions of to-day were the earnest faith of the most enlightened of our ancestors. As Shakspeare has recorded the universal belief of his time in his description of the cure of scrofula by the touch of a king, in “Macbeth,” so has Dryden, in his version of the “Tempest,” given us the method and operation of sympathetic surgery. Hippolito is wounded, and Ariel says,
He must be dressed again as I have done it. Anoint the sword which pierced him with this weapon salve, and wrap it close from air, till I have time to visit him again.
The reader may wish, perhaps, to have a recipe for this same potent “weapon salve.” Ariel may have had some patent nostrum of his own for anointing swords, but the favourite salve in these cases was made of human fat and blood, well simmered with mummy, and moss from a dead man’s skull. Some held that the moss, to have its full efficacy, must grow on the skull of a thief who had been hung on the gallows. Others thought moss from the skull of an honest man who had not been hung might answer, which would be, in our mild and milk-and-water era, a more convenient doctrine. There was a long and learned discussion as to whether it was necessary that the ointment, while being compounded, should be stirred with a murderer’s knife. So eminent a writer as Van Helmont tells us that Dr. Godonius was so nice in his prescriptions, that he would use only the moss gathered off the skull of a man of three letters; but that, Van Helmont intimates, was being “more nice than wise.” At that period, moss from dead men’s skulls was kept by all apothecaries, properly assorted and labelled, no doubt, to suit all customers. It is to be hoped that the druggists of that day were as scrupulous as our own, in keeping genuine and unadulterated medicines.
The great dramatist has not only made careful mention of this mode of surgical treatment, but in one of his sensation scenes, the force of which is very much diminished in our day, gives a vivid description of its efficacy in the following dialogue between Hippolito and Miranda:—
Mir. Hip. Oh! my wound pains me.
Mir. I am come to ease you.
[She unwraps the sword.
Mir. Hip. Alas! I feel the cold air come to me;
Mir. My wound shoots worse than ever.
[She wipes and anoints the sword.
Mir. Does it still grieve you?
Mir. Hip. Now methinks there’s something just upon it.
Mir. Do you find no ease?
Mir. Hip. Yes, yes, upon the sudden all the pain
Mir. Is leaving me. Sweet heaven, how I am eased!
Those who may be inclined to censure the improver of Shakspeare as a too superstitious gentleman, or as one too much inclined to humour the fantasies of the people for whom his dramas were written, may be pleased to know that this theory and practice had the learned support of not only the illustrious Van Helmont, but such eminent authorities as Descartes, Father Kircher, Gilbertus Magnus, and many others.
One of the most famous teachers and practitioners of sympathetic surgery was Sir Kenelm Digby, a gentleman of the bedchamber in the court of Charles I. He not only taught and practised this mode of cure with distinguished success in England, but had the honour of defending it in foreign countries, and especially before the nobles and learned men of Montpelier. Mr. James Howell has carefully reported an interesting case in his own experience. In endeavouring to part two of his friends who were fighting a duel, Mr. Howell was severely wounded in the hand by the sword of one of them. This incident suspended the fight, and one of the combatants bound up the wounded hand with his garter, took the patient home, and sent for a surgeon. But the wound became inflamed, and, lock-jaw being apprehended, Sir Kenelm Digby was sent for.
The great man, the man of science, the court physician came. We are not told that he even looked at the wounded hand, much less that he made any application to it. That would have been a very empirical, unscientific, and altogether quackish method. Even Dryden’s Miranda knew better than that. Sir Kenelm gravely asked if there was anything which had the blood upon it. They made diligent search, and found at last the garter, stiff with the gore clotted and dried upon it. The great surgeon then asked for a basin of water—common water, we are left to suppose—in which he dissolved a handful of powder of vitriol, which was prepared by exposure to the sun for 365 days. In this solution he immersed the bloody garter. The effect was almost instantaneous. The wound lost all its pain. A pleasing kind of freshness, as of a cold wet napkin, passed over the hand, and all the inflammation vanished,
The wound having been so wonderfully relieved, after dinner, but how long after the application we are not accurately informed, the garter was taken out of the basin and hung up to dry before a large fire; but no sooner was this done than the hand began to inflame and was soon as bad as before. The servant ran for the surgeon, but while he was gone it occurred to some one to put the garter again in the liquid. This was no sooner done than the hand again recovered, and before the arrival of the surgeon, or even of the servant who had gone for him. In five or six days, by keeping the garter in soak, the cure was completed.
This case of Mr. Howell, given by Sir Kenelm, with a most luminous explanation of the rationale of the cure, is what was called the cure by the wet way—a sympathetic surgical hydropathy, which may be commended to people who do not take kindly to their wet sheet packs and douches. The dry way is the one described in the “Tempest,” and was, as it continues to be, the most popular method.
Lord Gilbourne, an English nobleman, appears to have been an amateur practitioner of this method, and his success was quite equal to that of Ariel. Strauss gives an account of the case of a carpenter, working upon his lordship’s estate, who had severely cut himself with his axe. The axe, smeared with blood, was sent for, anointed with a potent ointment, wrapped up warmly and hung