Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/230



Thracians remove the heart from a lark while the bird is still alive, and wear it, prepared as an amulet, on the left thigh.

Procure a little of the dung of a wolf, preferably some which contains small bits of bone, and pack it in a tube which the patient may easily wear as an amulet on his right arm, thigh, or hip during the attack. He must be very careful, however, not to allow the parts around the seat of the pain to come in contact with the earth or with the water of a bath. This amulet is, in my experience, an unfailing remedy, and almost all physicians of any celebrity have commended its virtues.

Remove the nipple-like projection from the caecum of a young pig, mix myrrh with it, wrap it in the skin of a wolf or dog, and instruct the patient to wear it as an amulet during the waning of the moon. Striking effects may be looked for from this remedy.

Let the design of Hercules throttling a lion be engraved upon a Median stone, and then instruct the patient to wear it on his finger after it has been properly set in a ring of gold.

Take an iron ring and have the hoop made eight-sided. Then engrave upon the eighth side these words: "Flee, flee, oh Gaul! the lark has sought thee out." On the under surface of the head or seal of the ring engrave the letters J. C., thus: I have often made use of this amulet; and, while I should consider it wrong to keep silence about a remedial agent of such extraordinary efficacy in cases of colic, I feel bound to say that it should not be recommended to the first comer, but only to believers and to those individuals who know how to guard it carefully. The Great Hippocrates, with remarkable insight, gave the advice that things which are holy should be intrusted only to those who are of a religious character, and should be withheld from the profane. As regards the ring, however, the patient must be careful, before wearing it, to have a sketch made of it on either the seventeenth or the twenty-first day of the moon.

Alexander has been severely criticised for his advocacy of the employment of amulets in the treatment of diseases; but he defends himself against such criticism by saying that physicians owe it as a duty to their patients to study carefully what he calls the hidden forces of nature, and to pay unprejudiced attention to the effects produced by amulets and other magical remedies. He reminds his critics that Galen and other eminent medical authorities have insisted that a place be given to this class of agents in the list of