There is a perfect embarrassment of riches on this division of our subject, and the difficulty has been not to select, but to know what to reject.
Etmuller enumerates five different kinds of cures by transplantation: 1. Insemenation, wherein “magnes mumia” (the spirit distilled from mummy flesh) was used to water the rich earth in which certain seed had been planted; but care must be taken in the selection of the plant, some being beneficial, others noxious; 2. Implantatio, where a plant, already growing, or the root only of such a plant is selected, and watered as above described; 3. Impositio, where some of the skin of the diseased member, or some of the patient’s excrement, or anything else intimately connected with him, “aut ejus excrementum aut utrumque,” is inserted between the bark and body of a tree, and the opening then tamped with mud. But in every case bear in mind that if a slow, gradual cure is to be brought about, a slow-growing tree must be selected; but for a speedy recovery, a quick-growing tree; 4. Inoratio, in which daily certain trees or plants, until cure results, are to be watered with the “urina, sudore, fecibus alvi vel lotura membri aut totius corporis;” but it is recommended that each irrigation be covered up with earth, to keep out the air; 5. Inescatio, where “mummy” is given to an animal to eat; the animal will die, the patient recover.
Human ordure was a frequent addition to the “spiritus mumiæ.”
Frommann opens the way to a clearer understanding of the principles upon which these cures depended. He states that not all diseases were thus curable; only those which in themselves were “movable.” Poison could not be so cured, because its lethal action was effected too quickly for the slow-moving remedial agency of transplantation. Injuries to the “vital faculties,” such as “aneurisms of the aorta,” etc., were not transplantable. Worms ditto, although they were able to move of their own will. “Lipothymia” or syncope, was not transferable. All “transplantable” diseases were called “saline” diseases, because, according to the medical theories prevailing in those days, they originated in some defect of the “salts” of the body.—(See Frommann, “Tract. de Fascinatione,” pp. 1017, 1018.)
Among the strongest “magnetic” medicines, according to Paracelsus, was the one “ex stercore humano.”—(See Etmuller, vol. i. p. 69.)
There was another: “Take a sufficient quantity of the ordure of a healthy man, and make it into a poultice with human urine, to which add sweat gathered from the body with a sponge; place this in a clean place in the shade until it dries, and when needed for use, moisten with human blood.” “Recipe copiosum stercus hominis sani, et hoc cum urina ejusdem misce, redige in consistentiam pultis, adde quantum habere potes sudoris ex hominibus sanis a linteo aut spongia collecti, ponantur simul in loco mundo in umbra donec siccentur, hinc adde sanguinem recentem, misce, sicca, et ad usum reserva.”
Etmuller also mentions a “sympathetic” cure for quartan ague, in which the hair of the patient was to be mixed with food and thrown to birds, which, swallowing the food, took away the fever.
Another method was to take the clippings of the toe and finger nails of the sick person, place them in an egg and throw them to the birds; others again wrap them up in wax and early in the morning, before the rising of the sun, affix the parcel to the door of a neighbor’s house, or else tie it to the back of a living crab, and throw the crab back into the stream: “Sunt cui ad curandam febrem segmenta e manibus et pedibus ovo includunt, avibusque devoranda objiciunt; alii eadem ceræ involvunt, matutinoque tempore ante solis ortum januæ affigunt, aliii dorso cancri vivi alligant, cancrumque fluenti committunt.”—(Idem, vol. ii. p. 265.)
The first excrement of a man sick with dysentery was mixed with salt as a “magnetic” cure; to this, some people added the powder of eel-skins (Frommann, “Tractatus,” p. 1012, et seq.). Yellow jaundice patients urinated upon clean linen sheets; if they succeeded in dyeing them yellow they would recover soon; if not, not (p. 1012); roots wet with the patient’s urine were burned as a cure for the yellow jaundice (p. 1013); all the clothing of an epileptic patient was burned, and the ashes thrown in a stream, down-stream (p. 1013); especially was this the case if any of it had been defiled by alvine dejections voided in one of the paroxysms; and the same care was taken to burn this excrement (p. 1013). (Note that epilepsy was always regarded as the sacred disease; here we have a suggestion of human sacrifice.)
The method of curing by digging up the ground, depositing some plant and enriching the surrounding soil with the patient’s egestæ is given by Frommann (p. 1016); but the trees or plants to be selected for this purpose were to be those of forests or those which bore edible fruits, “ut fraxinus, quercus, betula, tilia, fagus, alnus,” etc. (Ash, oak, birch, linden, beech, alder, etc.) The animals had to be such as did not eat human flesh, as “canes, feles, equi, lupi, vulpes;” others could be used on occasion, but the results were not so sure (idem, p. 1017). There were two general methods: one, in which the “sanguis, pili, excrementa” of the patient himself were offered; the other, in which crabs, meat, eggs, lard, apples, and other things, were rubbed to the affected parts and then offered (idem.)