MEDICAL QUACKS AND QUACKERIES. 149 



the "manual exercise," and declared that after touching thirty to 

 forty a day he felt the goodness go out of him. No doubt these peo- 

 ple practiced unconsciously what Mesmer many years after practiced 

 by design. On the subject of Mesmerism and spiritualism I do not 

 propose to enter. Of late years cures by the laying on of hands, 

 assisted, however, by prayer, and the anointing with oil, have be- 

 come very common, especially in the United States, the hot-bed of 

 all sorts of quackeries. This summer there has been a " faith con- 

 vention " at Old Orchard, in Maine, where many people were publicly 

 cured by this method; all the diseases treated appeared to be, from the 

 indefinite history of cases reported in religious newspapers, affections 

 of the nervous system. Many hysterical cases were possibly benefited 

 purely by the effect of the imagination : as the disases are ones of the 

 imagination, so are the cures. We have yet to hear of a case of actual 

 disease, such as is daily seen in our hospitals, cured by this method. 



The immediate progenitor of our present race of quacks is Para- 

 celsus, who flourished in the sixteenth century ; he generally styled 

 himself Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Paracelsus Bombastus von 

 Hohenheim. His father, who was the natural son of a prince, gave 

 him an excellent education. He studied medicine, and afterward was 

 for some time professor at Basle, in Switzerland. Paracelsus denied 

 the utility of knowing the cause or mode of origin of disease ; he said 

 all he wanted to know was, how to cure it. He styled himself the 

 monarch of physicians, and asserted that the hair on the back of his 

 head knew more than all the writers from Galen to Avicenna, and he 

 publicly burned their books. He invented a nostrum called " azoth," 

 which he vaunted as the philosopher's stone, the tincture of life. He 

 proclaimed that he had the power of making man immortal, yet he 

 died at the age of forty-eight. Still, by the aid of opium, antimony, 

 and mercury, he performed some wonderful cures, and to him must 

 be awarded the credit of first drawing the attention of the j)rofession 

 to the value of these remedies in the treatment of diseases. He also 

 helped medicine to advance by showing contempt for traditional 

 methods of treatment and the humoral pathology of the ancients, 

 which had held sway for over two thousand years. 



The most remarkable example of credulity and superstition of the 

 public is found in the history of two quackeries which flourished in 

 the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I refer to the weapon-oint- 

 ment and sympathetic-poicder cures. The weapon-ointment was used 

 in healing wounds ; but, instead of the ointment being applied to the 

 wound, it was applied to the weapon which caused it. This was for- 

 tunate for the people so treated, as the applications to fresh wounds in 

 those times were most barbarous. The ointment was prepared in various 

 ways, and its ingredients were most diverse, consisting of human fat 

 and blood, mummy, moss from a dead man's skull, bull's blood and fat, 

 etc. At one time there was a schism in the weapon-salve school, and a 



