Sketches of Imposture, Deception, and Credulity

by R. A. Davenport

“If thou findest the cusp of the ascendant to fall in the very latter end of a sign, then, doubtless, the querent comes but to tempt thee; or if the question be not radical, if the lord of the ascendant or the hour be not of one triplicity, it signifies the carelessness of the querent, and that he cares not whether you hit or miss.”

Among the more remarkable of subsequent medical delusions were, the cure by sympathy, royal touch, and animal magnetism. Sounder views of medical practice were entertained by degrees; but enough of the old leaven of folly and superstition has, at different times, shown itself, to prove that human nature will never be free from the imputation of lending itself, either from vanity, indolence, or ignorance, to forward the views of ridiculous or unprincipled empiricism; the disciples of which would, nevertheless, be the first to disbelieve or dispute similar assertions or arguments, when applied to the exercise of other professions or trades.

The first medical delusion which claims our notice is the cure by sympathy. What is now the common method of healing wounds, appeared most unnatural to the surgeons at the end of the seventeenth century; and their legitimate and only cure proved such torture to the unhappy patients, that, in those days, nothing was to be heard in the hospitals, at the time of dressing, but howling and cries. A man proposing the romantic doctrine of adhesion of wounds by union of their edges, would have been despised; but, if he were bold and cunning enough to give an air of incantation to his cures, or declare that they were performed by a secret philosophical sympathy, he was sure of success. No surgeon in Europe ventured to unite wounds directly, without pretending to have learnt, from some Eastern sage, or to have discovered, by abstruse studies in philosophy and alchemy, a sympathetic or philosophical mode of cure.

The first inventor of the sympathetic powder was the celebrated Paracelsus, and the Paracelsian doctors flourished in England when Dr. Charleton wrote his ternary of paradoxes, chiefly on the magnetic or attractive power of wounds. This fanaticism lasted no short time, and was hardly to be paralleled, except by the study of the perpetual elixir, and the universal solvent.

Sir Kenelm Digby, secretary to Charles I., was driven into exile during the civil wars. In a discourse upon the cure by sympathy, pronounced at Montpelier before an assembly of nobles and learned men, he gave the curious case of Mr. Howell, who, whilst endeavouring to part two of his friends who were fighting, had his hand cut to the bone. Sir Kenelm was applied to for assistance. “I told him,” says he, “I would willingly serve him; but if, haply, he knew the manner how I would cure him, without touching or seeing him, it may be he would not expose himself to my manner of curing, because he would think it, peradventure, either ineffectual or superstitious.” He replied, “The wonderful things which many have related unto me of your way of medicinement makes me nothing doubt at all of its efficacy; and all that I have to say unto you is comprehended in the Spanish proverb—Hagase el milagro y hagalo Mahoma—Let the miracle be done, though Mahomet do it.”

“I asked him then for any thing that had the blood upon it; so he presently sent for his garter, wherewith his hand was first bound, and dissolving some vitriol in a basin of water, I put in the garter, observing in the interim what Mr. Howell did. He suddenly started, as if he had found some strange alteration in himself. I asked him what he ailed? ‘I know not what ails me, but I find that I feel no more pain; methinks that a pleasing kind of freshness, as it were a wet cold napkin, did spread over my hand, which hath taken away the inflammation that tormented me before.’ I replied, ‘Since then that you feel already so good effect of my medicament, I advise you to cast away all your plaisters, only keep the wound clean, and in a moderate temper betwixt heat and cold.’ To be brief; there was no sense of pain afterward; but within five or six days the wounds were cicatrized and entirely healed.”

The king obtained from Sir Kenelm the discovery of his secret, which he pretended had been taught him by a Carmelite friar, who had learned it in Armenia or Persia.

The fact was, the sympathetical physician understood the cure of wounds by adhesion more perfectly than others; but it was necessary to cheat the world into this safe method of cure, and they declined the use of it altogether, where they foresaw, from the nature of the wound, it could not succeed. The public opinion would have been so strong against any open innovation, that the sympathetic doctors got credit for something like witchcraft, and condescended to dress axes and swords, that the wounds might have leave to lie at rest till they healed. All cures by adhesion were mysteriously performed, and one in particular, called the secret dressing, in which great pains were taken, before laying the lips of the wound together, to suck out all the blood. This was chiefly used by drummers in regiments, to conceal the quarrels of the soldiers.

The trick of this way of cure consisted in making grimaces and contortions, signing their patients with the cross, and muttering between their teeth some unintelligible jargon. Their care was to keep the profession among themselves, and it was from the profanation of the sign of the cross that there arose a hot war between the priests and the suckers; the former refusing confession, extreme unction, or any sacrament to those who had undergone the magical or diabolical ceremonies of the suckers, who, on the other hand, refused to suck those connected in any way with the priests, being anxious to preserve their trade, which was not without its emoluments; for Verduc observes that they were still more skilful in sucking gold than blood.