The “Vulnerary Powder, and Tincture of the Sulphur of Venus,” performed wonders, one of which Dr. Colebatch relates of a Mr. Pool, who was run through the body with a sword, and lost four quarts of blood. The medicines being applied, the bleeding stopped; on the following day he “was gnawing tough ill-boiled mutton,” and drank a quart of ale; and in the course of five days he returned to duty in the camp. “A Mr. Cherry also, sergeant of grenadiers at the attack of the castle of Namur, was wounded in twenty-six places, twenty-three with bullets, and three large cuts on the head with a sword. He lay forty-eight hours stripped naked upon the breach, without a bit of bread or drop of drink, or any thing done to his wounds; yet this man was cured by the vulnerary powder and tincture alone, and never had any fever.”[16] The materials of the sympathetic powder were more heterogeneous and horrid than those which the witches used to drop into the caldron; human fat, human blood, mummy, the moss that grows in dead men’s skulls, or hogs’ brains; and the chief schism among the great masters of the sympathetic school arose from the question, whether it was necessary that the moss should grow absolutely in the skull of the thief who had hung on the gallows, and whether the medicine, while compounding, was to be stirred with a murderer’s knife? Some, anxious to avoid the damnable charges which were urged against this practice, defended it on philosophical principles, and from the analogy of other natural operations. Any lute, said they, being tuned in unison with another, is affected when the other is struck, the magnet turns by sympathy to the pole, amber attracts light bodies, loadstones hung to the breast make us cheerful and merry, and the wearing of jewels secures chastity. All acknowledged sympathetic cures were successful, and the established surgeons of that day refused to practise the treatment, only because it was impious and unlawful; for, said they, how can we contradict matters of fact? We come now to the second of the great medical delusions, that which attributed to the royal touch a sanative power in scrofulous cases. This is supposed to have been a monkish invention, to increase the reverence for kings, and was practised in England and France. Becket, a writer in the time of Charles II., fully describes the royal gift of touching for the evil, which gift had been confirmed and continued for six hundred and forty years. It is proved out of Corinthians I. chap. xii. ver. 9. “To another the gift of healing by the same spirit,” and they must needs be allowed no good subjects who dare deny this sanative faculty, when so many thousands had received benefit!