“The Powder of Sympathy”
POPULAR ACCOUNT OF THE MOST FAMOUS
AND THE ATTEMPTS WHICH HAVE BEEN MADE TO SOLVE THEM.
To which is Added a Small Budget of Interesting
Paradoxes, Illusions, and Marvels.
This 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,we learn that the wound was never to be brought into contact with the powder. A bandage was to be taken from the wound, immersed in the powder, and kept there until the wound healed.
This beats the absent treatment of Christian Science!
The powder was simply pulverized vitriol, that is, ferric sulphate, or sulphate of iron. Continue reading “The Powder of Sympathy”