Written charms were also believed in as capable of effecting cures, or,
at least, of preventing people from taking diseases. I have known people
who wore written charms, sewed into the necks of their coats, if men,
and into the headbands of petticoats if women. These talismans, in many
cases, I have little doubt, did real good in this way, that they
supplied their wearers with a courage which sufficed to brace up their
nervous system--which drove out fear, in fact,--a very important
condition for health, as physicians well know. These talismans were so
generally and thoroughly believed in, and so numerous and apparently
well-attested were the evidences of their beneficial effects, that in
years not long past, medical men believed in their efficacy, and
promulgated various theories to account for it.
It was also an accepted belief that diseases could be transferred to
animals, and even to vegetables. Cures held to be so effected were,
according to one medical theory, cures by "sympathy." A few instances,
culled from a work published during the latter half of the seventeenth
century (1663), entitled _The Usefulness of Experimental Philosophy_,
will illustrate this theory:--A medical man had been very ill of an
obstinate _marasmar_ (?) which so consumed him that he became quite a
skeleton, notwithstanding every remedy which he had tried.
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