Paracelsus describes the methods of applying this ointment, the precautions to be taken, and the manner in which it exerts its influence. It was the weapon which inflicted the wound which was to be anointed, and it would be effective no matter how far away the wounded person might be. It would not answer if an artery had been severed, or if the heart, the brain, or the liver had suffered the lesion. The wound was to be kept properly bandaged, and the bandages were to be first wetted with the patient’s urine. The anointment of the weapon was to be repeated every day in the case of a serious wound, or every second or third day when the wound was not so severe, and the weapon was to be wrapped after anointment in a clean linen cloth, and kept free from dust and draughts, or the patient would experience much pain. The anointment of the weapon acted on the wound by a magnetic current through the air direct to the healing balsam which exists in every living body, just as the heat of the sun passes through the air.
Paracelsus also prescribed the leaves of the Polygonum persicaria to be applied to sores and ulcers, and then buried. One of his disciples explains that the object of burying the leaves was that they attracted the evil spirits like a magnet, and thus drew these spirits from the patient to the earth.
The sympathetic egg was another device to cheat diseases, attributed to the same inventive genius. An empty chicken’s egg was to be filled with warm blood from a healthy person, carefully sealed and placed under a brooding hen for a week or two, so that its vitality should not be impaired. It was then heated in an oven for some hours at a temperature sufficient to bake bread. To cure a case this egg was placed in contact with the affected part and then buried. It was assumed that it would inevitably take the disease with it, as healthy and concentrated blood must have a stronger affinity for disease than a weaker sort.
Robert Fludd, M.D., the Rosicrucian, who fell under the displeasure of the College of Physicians on account of his unsound views from a Galenical standpoint, was a warm advocate of the Paracelsian Weapon Salve. In reply to a contemporary doctor who had ridiculed the theory he waxes earnest, and at times sarcastic. He explains that “an ointment composed of the moss of human bones, mummy (which is the human body combined with balm), human fat, and added to these the blood, which is the beginning and food of them all, must have a spiritual power, for with the blood the bright soul doth abide and operateth after a hidden manner. Then as there is a spiritual line protracted or extended in the Ayre between the wounded person and the Box of Ointment like the beam of the Sun from the Sun, so this animal beam is the faithful conductor of the Healing nature from the box of the balsam to the wounded body. And if it were not for that line which conveys the wholesome and salutiferous spirit, the value of the ointment would evaporate or sluce out this way or that way and so would bring no benefit to the wounded persons.”
Van Helmont, Descartes, Batista Porta, and other leaders of science, in the seventeenth century, espoused the theory cordially enough. Van Helmont’s contribution to the evidence on which it was founded is hard to beat. In his “De Magnetica Vulnerum Curatione,” written about 1644, he relates that a citizen of Brussels having lost his nose in a combat in Italy, repaired to a surgeon of Bologna named Tagliacozzi, who provided him with another, taking the required strip of flesh from the arm of a servant. This answered admirably, and the Brussels man returned home. But thirteen months later he found his nose was getting cold; and then it began to putrefy. The explanation, of course, was that the servant from whom the flesh had been borrowed had died. Van Helmont adds, “Superstites sunt horum testes oculati Bruxellae”; there are still eye-witnesses of this case at Brussels.
Moss from a dead man’s skull is a principal ingredient in all the sympathetic ointments, and the condition that the dead man should have died a violent death is generally insisted on. But Van Helmont, quoting from one Goclenius, adds another condition still more absurd. It is that the dead man’s name should only have three letters. Thus, for example, Dod would do, but not Dodd.
Sir Gilbert Talbot (in the time of Charles II) communicated to the Royal Society particulars of a cure he had made with Sympathetic Powder. An English mariner was stabbed in four places at Venice, and bled for three days without intermission. Sir Gilbert, who happened to be at Venice at the same time, was told of this disaster. He sent for some of the man’s blood and mixed Sympathetic Powder with it. At the same time he sent a man to bind up the patient’s wounds with clean linen. Soon after he visited the mariner and found all the wounds closed, and the man much comforted. Three days later the poor fellow was able to call on Sir Gilbert to thank him, but even then “he appeared like a ghost with noe blood left in his body.”
