(?) for four days together, that the pain kept her from sleeping; by the order of a medical man she put her finger into a cat’s ear, and within two hours was delivered from her pain.  And a councillor’s wife was cured of a panaritium (?) which had vexed her for four days by the same means.  In both cases the cat had received the pain in its ear and required to be held.  The gout is cured by sympathy:  by the patient sleeping with puppies, they take the disease, and the person recovers.  A boy ill with the king’s evil could not be cured, his father’s dog took to licking the sores, the dog took the sores, and the boy was completely cured.  A gentleman having a severe pain in the arm was cured by beating red coral with oak leaves, and applying it to the part affected till suppuration:  a hole was then made in the root of an oak towards the east, and the mixture put into it and the hole plugged up with a peg of the same tree, and from that time the pain did altogether cease; and when afterwards the mixture was removed from the tree, immediately the torments returned worse than before.  Sir Francis Bacon records a cure of warts:  he took a piece of lard with the skin on it, and after rubbing the warts with it the lard was exposed out of a southern window to putrify, and the warts wore away as it putrified.  Harvey tried to remove tumours and excrescences by putting the hand of a dead person that had died of a lingering disease upon them till the part felt cold.  In general the application was effective.

This idea of cure by sympathy retained its hold on the people till this century, and is not yet entirely gone.

There was another theory, which we may call the magnetic theory.  The philosophy of this theory contended that “The body when diseased resembled a gun; when loaded, it contains powder and ball, which, by the mere touch of a little spring, sets the whole machinery of the gun in motion, whereby the ball is expelled.  So also the mere touch or outward contact of certain bodies or substances has power, like a magnet, to set in action the machinery of nature by which the disease is dispelled—­sometimes slowly, but often suddenly like the bullet from the gun.  Helmont had a little stone, which, by plunging in oil of almonds, imbued the oil with such sanative power that it cured almost any disease.  It was sometimes applied inwardly, sometimes outwardly.  A gentleman who had an unwieldy groom procured for him a small fragment of this stone, and, by licking it with the tip of his tongue every morning, in three weeks he was reduced in bulk round the waist by a span without affecting his general health.  A gentleman in France who procured a small fragment of this stone cured several persons of inveterate diseases by letting them lick it.  The stone Lapis Nephriticus bound upon the pulse of the wrist of the left hand prevents stone, hysterics, and stops the flux of blood in any part.  A compound metal called electrum,