# Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 8/Sympathetic surgery

SYMPATHETIC SURGERY.
In the rural districts, when a man has the misfortune to run a nail into his foot, he finds it, carefully greases it, wraps it up, and lays it away in a safe and dry place. This is supposed to promote the healing of the wound and prevent lock-jaw. In like manner, an axe or chisel, which has inflicted a wound, is carefully wiped and protected from rust.
The philosophy of our day is not far-sighted enough to find out the relation between the nail or axe which has given a wound, and the wonderful processes by which nature repairs the injury; but our venerated ancestors, for some centuries, had entire faith in this sympathetic surgery; and, though long since rejected by men of science, it still survives among that large class ​of people who like to do as their fathers did before them.
The vulgar superstitions of to-day were the earnest faith of the most enlightened of our ancestors. As Shakspeare has recorded the universal belief of his time in his description of the cure of scrofula by the touch of a king, in “Macbeth,” so has Dryden, in his version of the “Tempest,” given us the method and operation of sympathetic surgery. Hippolito is wounded, and Ariel says,
He must be dressed again as I have done it. Anoint the sword which pierced him with this weapon salve, and wrap it close from air, till I have time to visit him again.
The reader may wish, perhaps, to have a recipe for this same potent “weapon salve.” Ariel may have had some patent nostrum of his own for anointing swords, but the favourite salve in these cases was made of human fat and blood, well simmered with mummy, and moss from a dead man’s skull. Some held that the moss, to have its full efficacy, must grow on the skull of a thief who had been hung on the gallows. Others thought moss from the skull of an honest man who had not been hung might answer, which would be, in our mild and milk-and-water era, a more convenient doctrine. There was a long and learned discussion as to whether it was necessary that the ointment, while being compounded, should be stirred with a murderer’s knife. So eminent a writer as Van Helmont tells us that Dr. Godonius was so nice in his prescriptions, that he would use only the moss gathered off the skull of a man of three letters; but that, Van Helmont intimates, was being “more nice than wise.” At that period, moss from dead men’s skulls was kept by all apothecaries, properly assorted and labelled, no doubt, to suit all customers. It is to be hoped that the druggists of that day were as scrupulous as our own, in keeping genuine and unadulterated medicines.
The great dramatist has not only made careful mention of this mode of surgical treatment, but in one of his sensation scenes, the force of which is very much diminished in our day, gives a vivid description of its efficacy in the following dialogue between Hippolito and Miranda:—
Mir. Hip. Oh! my wound pains me.
Mir. I am come to ease you.
[She unwraps the sword.
Mir. Hip. Alas! I feel the cold air come to me;
Mir. My wound shoots worse than ever.
[She wipes and anoints the sword.
Mir. Does it still grieve you?
Mir. Hip. Now methinks there’s something just upon it.
Mir. Do you find no ease?
Mir. Hip. Yes, yes, upon the sudden all the pain
Mir. Is leaving me. Sweet heaven, how I am eased!
Those who may be inclined to censure the improver of Shakspeare as a too superstitious gentleman, or as one too much inclined to humour the fantasies of the people for whom his dramas were written, may be pleased to know that this theory and practice had the learned support of not only the illustrious Van Helmont, but such eminent authorities as Descartes, Father Kircher, Gilbertus Magnus, and many others.
One of the most famous teachers and practitioners of sympathetic surgery was Sir Kenelm Digby, a gentleman of the bedchamber in the court of Charles I. He not only taught and practised this mode of cure with distinguished success in England, but had the honour of defending it in foreign countries, and especially before the nobles and learned men of Montpelier. Mr. James Howell has carefully reported an interesting case in his own experience. In endeavouring to part two of his friends who were fighting a duel, Mr. Howell was severely wounded in the hand by the sword of one of them. This incident suspended the fight, and one of the combatants bound up the wounded hand with his garter, took the patient home, and sent for a surgeon. But the wound became inflamed, and, lock-jaw being apprehended, Sir Kenelm Digby was sent for.
The great man, the man of science, the court physician came. We are not told that he even looked at the wounded hand, much less that he made any application to it. That would have been a very empirical, unscientific, and altogether quackish method. Even Dryden’s Miranda knew better than that. Sir Kenelm gravely asked if there was anything which had the blood upon it. They made diligent search, and found at last the garter, stiff with the gore clotted and dried upon it. The great surgeon then asked for a basin of water—common water, we are left to suppose—in which he dissolved a handful of powder of vitriol, which was prepared by exposure to the sun for 365 days. In this solution he immersed the bloody garter. The effect was almost instantaneous. The wound lost all its pain. A pleasing kind of freshness, as of a cold wet napkin, passed over the hand, and all the inflammation vanished,
The wound having been so wonderfully relieved, after dinner, but how long after the application we are not accurately informed, the garter was taken out of the basin and hung up to dry before a large fire; but no sooner was this done than the hand began to inflame and was soon as bad as before. The servant ran for the surgeon, but while he was gone it occurred to some one to put the garter again in the liquid. This was no sooner done than the hand again recovered, and before the arrival of the surgeon, or even of the servant who had gone for him. In five or six days, by keeping the garter in soak, the cure was completed.
This case of Mr. Howell, given by Sir Kenelm, with a most luminous explanation of the rationale of the cure, is what was called the cure by the wet way—a sympathetic surgical hydropathy, which may be commended to people who do not take kindly to their wet sheet packs and douches. The dry way is the one described in the “Tempest,” and was, as it continues to be, the most popular method.
Lord Gilbourne, an English nobleman, appears to have been an amateur practitioner of this method, and his success was quite equal to that of Ariel. Strauss gives an account of the case of a carpenter, working upon his lordship’s estate, who had severely cut himself with his axe. The axe, smeared with blood, was sent for, anointed with a potent ointment, wrapped up warmly and hung ​up in a closet. The wound did admirably, and was fast healing up, when, all at once, it became exceedingly painful. Word was sent to his lordship, who, we may imagine, went immediately to see his poor patient. No, he did not. Nothing of the kind. He went immediately and made a solemn visitation to the axe. What did he behold? The unfortunate instrument of all this mischief had fallen on the floor and partly escaped from its covering. No wonder the poor foot was inflamed and painful! Such a fall must have been a dreadful shock to it. Of course, the axe was properly treated, wrapped up again, and more carefully suspended, and, also of course, the patient recovered rapidly, and without any further discomfort.
These facts, and hundreds of a similar character which might be given, seem just as good as those which are brought to support every medical theory, and which attest the cures of every kind of practice and medicine. Every system, in whatever it may be weak, is strong in its facts. In our day allopathy, homœopathy, hydropathy, and all contradictory systems, are alike in the one important feature. They all appeal to a multitude of unquestionable and truly remarkable cures. Judged by the testimony of its opponents, every medical system is false, a miserable delusion and quackery; but tested by facts and cures, every system is true and a boon to humanity.
The usual mode of accounting for such cures as those which were explained as resulting from sympathy, is by attributing them to faith, hope, or imagination. These are powerful agents over the physical system, though it must be confessed that they do not account for all the facts. What had the imagination to do with the fall of the axe, hung up in his lordship’s closet? But it is doubtless true that expectation is a potent element of cure, and it is one every good physician, as well as every mercenary quack, makes full and constant use of. In many cases of illness, it makes no difference what medicine is given, so that it is not absolutely hurtful, or whether we only pretend to give a remedy. Bread pills, properly administered, produce a great variety of decided operations. Chalk powders, or a few drops of coloured water, act with great efficacy. They are emetic, cathartic, or sedative, as the physician may desire. Fear is believed to kill men in a pestilence by becoming a predisposing cause. Hope cures desperate cases. Lord Anson’s expedition to the South Sea had met with many misfortunes, and his ships that escaped storm and wreck lost almost their entire crews by scurvy. “Whatever discouraged the seamen or at any time damped their hopes never failed to add new vigour to the distemper, for it usually killed those who were in the last stages of it, and confined those to their hammocks who were before capable of some kind of duty.” Captain Cook went into the same seas on voyages of discovery, in which the sailors were constantly excited with adventures or the hope of them, and scarcely suffered from scurvy at all. “A merry heart,” says the Wise Monarch, “doeth good like medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the blood.”
The sweet influence of faith and hope was scarcely ever shown more remarkably than in some imaginative medical practice of the Prince of Orange, in the Siege of Breda, in 1625. That city, long besieged, had suffered all the miseries that constant fatigue, anxiety, and bad provisions could bring upon its inhabitants. The scurvy broke out, and carried off great numbers. This, and the seeming hopelessness of the defence, disposed the garrison to a surrender; but the Prince of Orange, not willing to lose the place, but unable to retain it, contrived to send letters to the soldiers, promising them speedy assistance, and sending pretended medicines against the scurvy, said to be of great price, and still greater efficacy. Three small vials were given to each physician, and it was said that three or four drops were sufficient to give a healing efficacy to a gallon of water. Not even were the commanders let into the secret. The soldiers and people flocked around the physicians in crowds. Cheerfulness was upon every countenance. Many of the sick were speedily and perfectly recovered. Such as had not moved their limbs for a month before, were seen to walk, with their limbs straight, sound, and whole, boasting their cure by the Prince’s remedy.
When we have such facts as these, how are we to discuss or examine the pretensions of any medicine or medical system? And the experience of almost every person can furnish facts of a similar character.
For example, the hands are covered with warts. You try acids, caustic, and the actual cautery, but with no benefit. The old ones grow out again, and new ones are coming. They are uncomfortable and hideous, and you are in despair. Some day a stranger offers, for sixpence, to send them all clean away. He counts them, and writes the number on a slip of paper, which he puts in his pocket, and you see him no more. In a fortnight all the warts, new and old, big and little, have disappeared, and never again return. The man did nothing to the warts—perhaps he anointed the paper; or was it the expectation of cure? You had faith enough to give the sixpence, which you were assured was a mere formality. As to expecting a cure, you probably quite forgot it, until, one day, the annoying excrescences were gone.
A friend of the present writer, an artist and a man of business, had an attack of fever and ague, which, for several months, baffled all the ordinary means of cure. Some one told him of an old German, who had cured many cases, and at last, out of annoyance and curiosity, he went to see him. It is hard to say whether he had faith or hope in the old German; but he knocked at his cabin-door.
“Goom in,” grunted Mein Herr. Our friend entered. “Ah! you got der chills and fever,” said he, without moving from his chimney-corner. “Well, you can go—you won’t have dem any more.”
He went, as he was bid, and did not have another fit of ague. There could scarcely be a cheaper or less troublesome cure; but it is not very easily accounted for.
Elias Ashmole wrote in his Diary, April 11, 1687:
“I took early in the morning a good dose of elixir, and hung three spiders about my neck, and drove my ague away. Deo Gratias.”
Now what drove away the ague? The chips of ​a gallows, sewed in a bag and worn around the neck, are good for ague; and the shoes in which a man has been hanged, as well as the rope, have great efficacy.
Sir Robert Boyle gives a favourite recipe for ague:—Beat together salt, hops, and blue currants, and tie them upon the wrist.
A learned author reports fifty cases cured by writing the words febra fuge, and cutting a letter from the paper every day. The disease gradually diminishes, and disappears with the last letter.
Should this fail to cure, you can bury a new-laid egg at a cross-road in the dead of the night; or break a piece of salted bran-bread and give it to a dog; or, if you prefer a classic cure, place under your pillow the fourth book of the “Iliad.”
The power of colours over diseases, once supposed to exist, may be considered as a branch of sympathetic medicine. White substances were considered refrigerant, and red ones heating. Red flowers were given for diseases of the blood, and yellow ones for the bile. In small-pox, red coverings, bed-curtains, &c., were used to bring out the eruption. The patient was only to look at red substances, and his drink was coloured red. The physician of Edward II. treated the king’s son successfully by this rule; and, as lately as 1765, the Emperor Francis I., when sick of the small-pox, was, by the order of his physicians, rolled up in a scarlet cloth, but he died notwithstanding. Flannel, nine times dyed blue, was used for glandular swellings. To this day the tradition remains that certain colours are good for certain disorders. Thousands of people believe that red flannel is better than white for rheumatism. A red string worn round the neck is a common preventive of nose-bleed.
We smile at these facts or fancies; we plume ourselves upon our superior wisdom; but it may be doubted whether medicine can yet take its place among the certain sciences, or whether any one in modern times has written a wiser sentence than that of Plato, where he says: “The office of physician extends equally to the purification of the mind and body; to neglect the one is to expose the other to evident peril. It is not only the body that, by its sound constitution, strengthens the soul; but the well-regulated soul, by its authoritative power, maintains the body in perfect health.”