A person who believes himself bewitched by execration and the interment of a toad, should carry about him a living toad.
Southey says,[989] “The signatures [were] the books out of which the ancients first learned the virtues of herbs—Nature—having stamped on divers of them legible characters to discover their uses.” Every healing plant, it was thought, bears in some part of its structure the type or signature of its peculiar virtue. Oswald Crollius is supposed to have been “the great discoverer of signatures.” Some of these strange fancies are as fantastic as those of Swedenborg. Walnuts were considered to be the perfect signature of the head, the shell as the skull and the convolutions of the kernel as those of the two hemispheres of the brain, the outer skin would represent the scalp. So the signature doctors used the husks for scalp wounds, the inner peel for disorders of the dura mater, and the kernel was “very profitable for the brain and resists poisons.” The peony when in bud being something like a man’s head was “very available against the falling sickness.” Poppy-heads for the same reason were used “with success” in general diseases of the head. Lilies-of-valley were known by signature to cure apoplexy; as Coles says, “for as that disease is caused by the dropping of humours into the principal ventricles of the brain, so the flowers of this lily hanging on the plants as if they were drops, are of wonderful use herein.”
Capillary herbs naturally announced themselves as good for diseases of the hair. The stone crop “hath the signature of the gums,” and so was used for scurvy. The scales of pine-cones were used for the toothache, because they resemble the front teeth. Prickly plants like thistles and holly were used for pleurisy and stitch in the side. Saxifrage was good for the stone; kidney beans ought to have been useful for kidney diseases, but seem to have been overlooked except as articles of diet.
CHAPTER VII.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
The Sciences accessory to Medicine.—The great Schools of Medical Theory.—Boerhaave and his System.—Stahl.—Hoffman.—Cullen.—Brown.—Hospitals.—Bichat and the New Era of Anatomy.—Mesmer and Mesmerism.—Surgery.—The Anatomists, Physiologists, and Scientists of the Period.—Inoculation and Vaccination.
The medical history of the eighteenth century affords but a meagre result, notwithstanding the brilliant talents and indefatigable industry of the famous men who devoted their energies to the healing art. Their great aim was to create systems of medicine which should be philosophical and complete.
It is not only in what is strictly the art of healing that the members of the medical profession have ever been amongst the greatest benefactors of the world, but in what are known as the accessory sciences many of the most distinguished, enlightened, and self-sacrificing of the heroes of science have been affiliated to the profession of medicine. Not only the heroes, but the martyrs of medicine, crowd the scientific calendar. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were fertile in the efforts to apply the results of discoveries in the physical sciences to the relief of human suffering. If these efforts were but partially successful, so far as medicine—considered apart from surgery—was concerned, it was not in consequence of less industry in that department, but because speculation and theorising about the causes of disease monopolised the attention which, if devoted to observation of facts, would have been fertile in result. Schools, Systems, and Sects were the chief product of the medical activity of the eighteenth century. Although not perhaps of much direct benefit to medicine, indirectly the study of the sciences accessory to it must have been of considerable benefit as an educational factor in the training of the intellect of physicians.
The Great Schools of Medical Theory.
Whewell, in his History of Scientific Ideas,[990] classifies the successive biological hypotheses under the heads: (1) The Mystical School; (2) The Iatro-Chemical School; (3) The Iatro-Mathematical School; (4) The Vital-Fluid School; (5) The Psychical School.