ne of the best surgeons of his
time. He was fully aware that a part of the real secret of the Unguentum
Armarium consisted in the washing and bandaging the wound and then
letting it alone. But he could not resist the solemn assertions
respecting its efficacy; he gave way before the outcry of facts, and
therefore, instead of denying all their pretensions, he admitted and
tried to account for them upon supernatural grounds. As the virtue of
those applications, he says, which are made to the weapon cannot
reach the wound, and as they can produce no effect without contact, it
follows, of necessity, that the Devil must have a hand in the
business; and as he is by far the most long headed and experienced of
practitioners, he cannot find this a matter of any great difficulty.
Hildanus himself reports, in detail, the case of a lady who had received
a moderate wound, for which the Unguentum Armarium was employed without
the slightest use. Yet instead of receiving this flat case of failure as
any evidence against the remedy, he accounts for its not succeeding
by the devout character of the lady, and her freedom from that
superstitious and over-imaginative tendency which the Devil requires in
those who are to be benefited by his devices.
Lord Bacon speaks of the Weapon Ointment, in his Natural History, as
having in its favor the testimony of men of credit, though, in his own
language, he himself "as yet is not fully inclined to believe it." His
remarks upon the asserted facts respecting it show a mixture of wise
suspicion and partial belief. He does not like the precise directions
given as to the circumstances under which the animals from which some of
the materials were obtained were to be killed; for he thought it looked
like a provision for an excuse in case of failure, by laying the fault
to the omission of some of these circumstances. But he likes well that
"they do not observe the confecting of the Ointment under any certain
constellation; which is commonly the excuse of magical medicines, when
they fail, that they were not made under a fit figure of heaven." [This
was a mistake, however, since the two recipes given by Hildanus are both
very explicit as to the aspect of the heavens required for different
stages of the process.] "It was pretended that if the offending weapon
could not be had, it would serve the purpose to anoint a wooden one made
like it." "This," says Bacon, "I should doubt to be a device to keep
this stran
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