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. At length he
tried a sympathetic remedy: he took an egg, and having boiled it hard
in his own urine, he then with a bodkin perforated the shell in
different parts, and then buried it in an ant-hill. As the ants wasted
the egg he found his strength increase, and he soon was completely
cured. A daughter of a French officer was so tormented by a _paronychia_
(?) 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