Some Magical Remedies or Amulets Recommended by Alexander of Tralles, as Effective in the Treatment of Colic.—The Thracians remove the heart from a lark while the bird is still alive, and wear it, prepared as an amulet, on the left thigh.
Procure a little of the dung of a wolf, preferably some which contains small bits of bone, and pack it in a tube which the patient may easily wear as an amulet on his right arm, thigh, or hip during the attack. He must be very careful, however, not to allow the parts around the seat of the pain to come in contact with the earth or with the water of a bath. This amulet is, in my experience, an unfailing remedy, and almost all physicians of any celebrity have commended its virtues.
Remove the nipple-like projection from the caecum of a young pig, mix myrrh with it, wrap it in the skin of a wolf or dog, and instruct the patient to wear it as an amulet during the waning of the moon. Striking effects may be looked for from this remedy.
Let the design of Hercules throttling a lion be engraved upon a Median stone, and then instruct the patient to wear it on his finger after it has been properly set in a ring of gold.
Take an iron ring and have the hoop made eight-sided. Then engrave upon the eighth side these words: “Flee, flee, oh Gaul! the lark has sought thee out.” On the under surface of the head or seal of the ring engrave the letters J. C., thus:
I have often made use of this amulet; and, while I should consider it wrong to keep silence about a remedial agent of such extraordinary efficacy in cases of colic, I feel bound to say that it should not be recommended to the first comer, but only to believers and to those individuals who know how to guard it carefully. The Great Hippocrates, with remarkable insight, gave the advice that things which are holy should be intrusted only to those who are of a religious character, and should be withheld from the profane. As regards the ring, however, the patient must be careful, before wearing it, to have a sketch made of it on either the seventeenth or the twenty-first day of the moon.
Alexander has been severely criticised for his advocacy of the employment of amulets in the treatment of diseases; but he defends himself against such criticism by saying that physicians owe it as a duty to their patients to study carefully what he calls the hidden forces of nature, and to pay unprejudiced attention to the effects produced by amulets and other magical remedies. He reminds his critics that Galen and other eminent medical authorities have insisted that a place be given to this class of agents in the list of authorized remedies; and he adds that Galen further emphasizes the duty of the physician to employ them when other measures fail, or when the patients themselves frankly confess that they have faith in their efficacy and therefore wish them to be tried. Alexander also makes the statement that Galen, after treating for a long time all reports about the beneficial results obtained from the employment of magical measures as old women’s tales, had finally decided that these benefits were at times marvelous and should be accepted as genuine by physicians even if they are unable to explain them.
How much Alexander of Tralles really believed in these supernatural agents, or to what extent he relied upon their effect in influencing the imagination, we may not know; but his was an age of superstition, and the conditions governing society at that time were very different from those which control the world at the present day.
Paulus Aegineta.—Paulus Aegineta[46] was born in the Island of Aegina, not far from Athens, in the early part of the seventh century A. D., and practiced medicine in Alexandria, Egypt. He is known to us as the author of a compend of medicine which was very popular during a long period of time, especially among the Arabs, who, as early as two hundred years after his death, translated his work from the Greek into their own language. At a still later period it was also translated into Latin, the two best versions in this language which we now possess being those of Guintherus Andernacus (Paris, 1532) and of J. Cornarius (Basel, 1556). There is also an English translation by F. Adams (“The Seven Books of Paulus Aegineta,” London, 1845–1847), which is favorably spoken of by Neuburger, and which is apparently at the present time the only existing version of the work of Paulus of Aegina in a modern European language; for the French translation by René Briau (“La Chirurgie de Paul d’Égine,” Paris, 1855) comprises only Book VI.