“Have a care,” says Culpepper, “you use not such medicines to one part of your body which are appropriated to another; for if your brain be overheated and you use such medicines as cool the heart or liver you may make mad work.”
But it was not quite so simple a thing as it may seem to be to select the proper remedy, because there were conditions which made it necessary to follow an antipathetical treatment. For instance, Saturn ruling the bones caused toothache; but if Jupiter happened to be in the ascendant, the proper drug to employ was one in the service of the opposing planet. Modern astronomy has removed the heavenly bodies so far from us that we have ceased to regard them in the friendly way which once characterised our relations with them. To quote Culpepper again: “It will seem strange to none but madmen and fools that the stars should have influence upon the body of man, considering he being an epitomy of the Creation must needs have a celestial world within himself; for ... if there be an unity in the Godhead there must needs be an unity in all His works, and a dependency between them, and not that God made the Creation to hang together like a rope of sand.”
Among the strange theories which have found acceptance in medical history, mainly it would seem by reason of their utter baselessness and absurdity, none is more unaccountable than the belief in the so-called sympathetic remedies. There is abundant material for a long chapter on this particular manifestation of faith in the impossible, but a few prominent instances of the remarkable method of treatment comprised in the designation will suffice to prove that it was seriously adopted by men capable of thinking intelligently.
The germ of the idea goes back to very early ages. Dr. J. G. Frazer, the famous authority on primitive beliefs, traces the commandment in the Pentateuch, “Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk,” to an ancient prejudice against the boiling of milk in any circumstances, on the ground that this would cause suffering to the animal which yielded the milk. If the suffering could be thus conveyed, it was logical to believe that healing was similarly capable of transference.
Pliny (quoted by Cornelius Agrippa) says: “If any person shall be sorry for a blow he has given another, afar off or near at hand, if he shall presently spit into the middle of the hand with which he gave the blow, the party that was smitten shall presently be free from pain.”