man to be letten blode; ye ix of the mone, neyther
be nyght ne by day, it is not good." They also tell of a physician
named Simon Trippe, who wrote to a patient in excuse for not visiting
him, as follows: "As for my comming to you upon Wensday next, verely
my promise be past to and old pacient of mine, a very good
gentlewoman, one Mrs. Clerk, wch now lieth in great extremity. I
cannot possibly be with you till Thursday. On Fryday and Saterday the
signe wilbe in the heart; on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, in the
stomake; during wch time it wilbe no good dealing with your ordinary
physicke untill Wensday come sevenight at the nearest, and from that
time forwards for 15 or 16 days passing good."[83]

Not unlike this is an incident of the year 686, given by Bede, where
"a holy Bishop having been asked to bless a sick maiden, asked 'when
she had been bled?' and being told that it was on the fourth day of
the moon, said: 'You did very indiscreetly and unskilfully to bleed
her on the fourth day of the moon; for I remember that Archbishop
Theodore, of blessed memory, said that bleeding at that time was very
dangerous, when the light of the moon and the tide of the ocean is
increasing; and what can I do to the girl if she is like to die?'"[84]

"So great, indeed," says Fort, "became the abuse of medical astrology,
whether by the direct juxtaposition of stellar influence, or through
apposite images, that a celebrated Church Council at Paris declared
that images of metal, wax, or other materials fabricated under certain
constellations or according to fixed characters--figures of peculiar
form, either baptized, consecrated, or exorcised, or rather desecrated
by the performance of formal rites at stated periods which it was
asserted, thus composed, possessed miraculous virtues set forth in
superstitious writings--were placed under the ban and interdicted as
errors of faith."[85]

We shall see that magnetism developed from astrology, and some other
forms of mental healing from magnetism. One of these, sympathetic
cures, was talismanic in its character, and therefore I give a brief
account of its method of working, in this place.

Sympathetic cures probably started with Paracelsus, although Von
Helmont tells us that the secret was first put forth by Ericcius
Wohyus, of Eburo. As a development from magnetism the former
originated the "weapon salve" which excited so much attention about
the middle of the seventeenth century. The fol