Stanching Blood.
The ancients firmly believed that blood could be stanched by charms. The bleeding of Ulysses is reputed to have been stopped by this means; and Cato the Censor has given us an incantation for setting dislocated bones. To this day charms are supposed to arrest the flow of blood.
"Tom Potts was but a serving man,
But yet he was a doctor good;
He bound his kerchief on the wound,
And with some kind word he stanched the blood."
Sir Walter Scott says, in the "Lay of the Last Minstrel"—
"She drew the splinter from the wound,
And with a charm she stanch'd the blood."