eck of a live eel,
and put him in a tub of water. The eel will die, and the patient will
recover."

Wiseman, the great surgeon, was discoursing eloquently on the efficacy of
the royal touch in scrofula. The founder of the Ashmolean Museum at
Oxford, consorting with alchemists and astrologers, was treasuring the
manuscripts of the late pious Dr. Richard Napier, in which certain
letters (Rx Ris) were understood to mean Responsum Raphaelis,--the answer
of the angel Raphael to the good man's medical questions. The
illustrious Robert Boyle was making his collection of choice and safe
remedies, including the sole of an old shoe, the thigh bone of a hanged
man, and things far worse than these, as articles of his materia medica.
Dr. Stafford, whose paper of directions to his "friend, Mr. Wintrop," I
cited, was probably a man of standing in London; yet toad-powder was his
sovereign remedy.

See what was the state of belief in other matters among the most
intelligent persons of the colonies, magistrates and clergymen. Jonathan
Brewster, son of the church-elder, writes the wildest letters to John
Winthrop about alchemy,--"mad for making gold as the Lynn rock-borers are
for finding it."

Remember the theology and the diabology of the time. Mr. Cotton's
Theocracy was a royal government, with the King of kings as its nominal
head, but with an upper chamber of saints, and a tremendous opposition in
the lower house; the leader of which may have been equalled, but cannot
have been surpassed by any of our earth-born politicians. The demons
were prowling round the houses every night, as the foxes were sneaking
about the hen-roosts. The men of Gloucester fired whole flasks of
gunpowder at devils disguised as Indians and Frenchmen.

How deeply the notion of miraculous interference with the course of
nature was rooted, is shown by the tenacity of the superstition about
earthquakes. We can hardly believe that our Professor Winthrop, father
of the old judge and the "squire," whom many of us Cambridge people
remember so well, had to defend himself against the learned and excellent
Dr. Prince, of the Old South Church, for discussing their phenomena as if
they belonged to the province of natural science:

Not for the sake of degrading the aspect of the noble men who founded our
State, do I refer to their idle beliefs and painful delusions, but to
show against what influences the common sense of the medical profession
had to assert itself.