EARLY SUPERSTITIONS OF MEDICINE. 99 



theologians of the day as tainted with heresy, because he ventured on 

 some speculations not sanctioned by the verdict of antiquity. 



The Humoral Pathology had been established as a simple explana- 

 tion of ordinary diseases, which the more educated people had begun 

 to think might be owing to natural causes ; but the pestilences which 

 ravaged nations, and indeed any strange and unaccountable malady, 

 were still unhesitatingly referred to some unpropitious conjunction of 

 the planets, or the machinations of the devil. This Humoral Pathol- 

 ogy assumed the existence of four humors in the body, viz., blood, 

 melancholy, choler, and phlegm. Blood was supposed to be formed 

 by the liver, melancholy by the spleen, choler by the gall-bladder, and 

 phlegm by the stomach. The temperament of each individual was 

 termed sanguine, melancholy, choleric, or phlegmatic, according to the 

 humor naturally predominant in his constitution, and one fluid prevail- 

 ing with abnormal excess over the others gave rise to morbid condi- 

 tions. The faculty still held to the doctrine of " signatures," as it was 

 called, as the basis of therapeutics ; wdrich doctrine assumed certain 

 remedies to be potent in certain diseases, because there was some ex- 

 ternal resemblance or fanciful connection between the two. Thus, 

 scarlet bed-curtains were a cure for scarlet fever, measles, or any dis- 

 ease with a red eruption on the skin, and the grandfather of Maria 

 Theresa died of small-pox, wrapped, by order of his physicians, in 

 twenty yards of scarlet broadcloth ! The yellow powder turmeric was 

 a remedy for jaundice, the lung of the long-winded fox a cure for 

 asthma and shortness of breath ; the heart of a nightingale was pre- 

 scribed for loss of memory ; the royal touch was a specific for scrofula 

 or king's evil; and we find John Brown, chirurgeon-in-ordinary to 

 Charles II., writing a treatise on the "Royal Gift of Healing Strumses 

 by Imposition of Hands," with a description of the proper and effica- 

 cious manner of conducting the ceremony. This delusion actually held 

 its ground until the eighteenth century, when the great Dr. Johnson 

 was touched by Queen Anne. 



As late as 1623, Sir Kenelm Digby, the Admirable Crichton of his 

 time, produced a sympathetic powder which was to cure wounds even 

 when the patient was out of sight. This powder had extraordinary 

 success, and its efficacy was almost universally acknowledged. 



The more advanced minds were, in truth, not yet in the condition 

 most favorable to the development of the sciences. Men of the most 

 daring and original minds were tainted with superstition and credulity. 

 Luther believed that the devil tormented him with earache ; he em- 

 phatically enforced the duty of burning witches, and earnestly recom- 

 mended some anxious parents to destroy their son, whom he declared 

 to be possessed by an evil spirit ! The belief in witchcraft was still 

 universal, and the last witch was not burnt until 1722. Bishops, 

 judges, magistrates, and learned men, all agreed in crediting the 

 reality of sorcery and the efficacy of astrology. 



