theologians of the day as tainted with heresy, because he ventured on some speculations not sanctioned by the verdict of antiquity.
The Humoral Pathology had been established as a simple explanation of ordinary diseases, which the more educated people had begun to think might be owing to natural causes; but the pestilences which ravaged nations, and indeed any strange and unaccountable malady, were still unhesitatingly referred to some unpropitious conjunction of the planets, or the machinations of the devil. This Humoral Pathology assumed the existence of four humors in the body, viz., blood, melancholy, choler, and phlegm. Blood was supposed to be formed by the liver, melancholy by the spleen, choler by the gall bladder, and phlegm by the stomach. The temperament of each individual was termed sanguine, melancholy, choleric, or phlegmatic, according to the humor naturally predominant in his constitution, and one fluid prevailing with abnormal excess over the others gave rise to morbid conditions. The faculty still held to the doctrine of "signatures," as it was called, as the basis of therapeutics; which doctrine assumed certain remedies to be potent in certain diseases, because there was some external resemblance or fanciful connection between the two. Thus, scarlet bed curtains were a cure for scarlet fever, measles, or any disease with a red eruption on the skin, and the grandfather of Maria Theresa died of smallpox, wrapped, by order of his physicians, in twenty yards of scarlet broadcloth! The yellow powder turmeric was a remedy for jaundice, the lung of the long winded fox a cure for asthma and shortness of breath; the heart of a nightingale was prescribed for loss of memory; the royal touch was a specific for scrofula or king's evil; and we find John Brown, chirurgeon-in-ordinary to Charles II., writing a treatise on the "Royal Gift of Healing Strumæs by Imposition of Hands," with a description of the proper and efficacious manner of conducting the ceremony. This delusion actually held its ground until the eighteenth century, when the great Dr. Johnson was touched by Queen Anne.
As late as 1623, Sir Kenelm Digby, the Admirable Crichton of his time, produced a sympathetic powder which was to cure wounds even when the patient was out of sight. This powder had extraordinary success, and its efficacy was almost universally acknowledged.
The more advanced minds were, in truth, not yet in the condition most favorable to the development of the sciences. Men of the most daring and original minds were tainted with superstition and credulity. Luther believed that the devil tormented him with earache; he emphatically enforced the duty of burning witches, and earnestly recommended some anxious parents to destroy their son, whom he declared to be possessed by an evil spirit! The belief in witchcraft was still universal, and the last witch was not burnt until 1722. Bishops, judges, magistrates, and learned men, all agreed in crediting the reality of sorcery and the efficacy of astrology.
