THE POWDER OF SYMPATHY 



HIS curious occult method of curing wounds is 

 indissolubly associated with the name of Sir 

 Kenelm Digby (born 1603, died 1665), though 

 it was undoubtedly in use long before his time. 

 He himself tells us that he learned to make and apply the 

 drug from a Carmelite, who had traveled in the east, and 

 whom he met in Florence, in 1622. The descendants of 

 Digby are still prominent in England, and O. W. Holmes, 

 in his " One Hundred Days in Europe," tells us that he 

 had met a Sir Kenelm Digby, a descendant of the famous 

 Sir Kenelm of the seventeenth century, and that he could 

 hardly refrain from asking him if he had any of his ancestor's 

 famous powder in his pocket. 



Digby was a student of chemistry, or at least of the 

 chemistry of those days, and wrote books of Recipes and 

 the making of " Methington [metheglin or mead ?] Syder, 

 etc." He was, as we have seen in the previous article, 

 a believer in palingenesy and made experiments with a view 

 to substantiate that strange doctrine. Evelyn calls him an 

 " errant quack," and he may have been given to quackery, 

 but then the loose scientific ideas of those days allowed a 

 wide range in drawing conclusions which, though they seem 

 absurd to us, may have appeared to be quite reasonable to 

 the men of that time. 



From his book on the subject, 1 we learn that the wound 



1 Touching the Cure of Wounds by the Powder of Sympathy. With 

 Instructions how to make the said Powder. Rendered faithfully out of 

 French into English by R. White, Gent. London, 1658. 



Ill 



