An opportunity soon presented itself to try the powers of the famous powder. A certain Mr. Howell, having been wounded in endeavoring to part two of his friends who were fighting a duel, submitted himself to a trial of the sympathetic powder. Four days after he received his wounds, Sir Kenelm dipped one of Mr. Howell's garters in a solution of the powder, and immediately, it is said, the wounds, which were very painful, grew easy, although the patient, who was conversing in a corner of the chamber, had not the least idea of what was doing with his garter. He then returned home leaving his garter in the hands of Sir Kenelm, who had hung it up to dry, when Mr. Howell sent his servant in a great hurry to tell him that his wounds were paining him horribly; the garter was therefore replaced in the solution of the Powder, and the patient got well after five or six days of its continued immersion.
King James I, his son, afterwards Charles I, the Duke of Buckingham, then Prime Minister, and all the principal personages of the time were cognizant of this fact; and James himself, being curious to know the secret of this remedy, asked it of Sir Kenelm, who revealed it to him, and his majesty had the opportunity of making several trials of its efficacy, which all succeeded in a surprising manner.
Tar Water and Therapeutic Faith.—One further story of an old nostrum deserves to be told because of the distinction of its chief promoter, who did not, however, as do most of the nostrum promoters, make a fortune by it. This is the incident of Bishop Berkeley and his tar water. Berkeley was one of the leaders of thought of the eighteenth century. At one time he came to America with the idea of enlightening the ignorance of the colonists and of founding a school of philosophy. Besides being one of the most learned men of his time, he was one of the best. He was known for his gentleness, his unselfishness, and his lack of pretension. Yet all of these virtues were unable to save him from falling a victim to a medical delusion. One of his essays is on the value of tar water in medicine, and is entitled "Siris, a Chain of Philosophical Reflections and Inquiries Concerning the Virtues of Tar Water," etc.
Tar water was prepared by stirring a gallon of water with a quart of tar, letting it stand for several days, and then pouring off the clear water. It, in fact, retained scarcely more of the tar than the odor. According to the great philosopher, this not only cured, but prevented diseases. The list is, indeed, so long that it is hard to understand how the claims for it could have received any credence. They did, however, and Berkeley himself, and many of his friends, were cured of many and various ills, and were protected from many more by its frequent use. The odor was the factor that proved of suggestive value and set free the springs of vital energy.
Sarsaparilla.—It might be thought that such deception of self and others as has been illustrated in the weapon salve and sympathetic powder would be impossible in our enlightened day. Anyone who thinks so forgets certain incidents of recent times. The story of sarsaparilla is a striking illustration. Few drugs have been more popular in the last half century, and it is even yet popularly supposed to be a wonderful tonic, a cure for many diseases. During the first half of the nineteenth century, when the humoral theory of the causation of diseases was generally accepted, certain German physicians thought they observed that a decoction of sarsaparilla was a sovereign remedy for various ailments having their origin in the blood. The blood was at that time supposed to become impure for many reasons, and the possibility of neutralizing such impurity by medical measures was seriously attempted. As Virchow used to insist, the humoral pathology still holds its ground in popular estimation, and so blood purifiers are favorite remedies, and will doubtless continue to be for at least another generation, until cellular pathology secures a hold on the popular mind.
Sarsaparilla came in, then, as a great blood purifier, and was used for ten years by many of the physicians of the world, confident that they were obtaining excellent results from its use. After a time, however, further study of the drug showed that it was inert. Gradually the employment of sarsaparilla as a remedial agent ceased, though it continued to be used as an elegant vehicle in the prescription of nauseating remedies.
Only after it had been thus abandoned by the regular profession, was it taken up extensively by others who advertised its virtues widely and secured a great clientele for it. Probably more money has been spent on sarsaparilla during the last fifty years than on any other single drug. Many millions were every year appropriated by rival concerns to advertise its virtues. It has been possible at any time during the last half century to secure any number of people who were willing and ready to declare—and most of them convinced of the truth of what they said—that various preparations of sarsaparilla had cured them of long-standing ills, and that they considered it a life-saving remedy.
The efficient ingredient in the sarsaparilla, so far as any of its various preparations have seemed to do good, has not been anything that was in the bottle, but the printer's ink that was absorbed from the outside of it. People were persuaded that they would get better, and, as far as most of them were concerned, this was of itself quite sufficient to turn the scale in favor of improvement that led to the obliteration of symptoms. So long as these symptoms were a source of worry and trouble to them, they continued to be quite incurable. Just as soon as the inhibition of nervous energy, due to worry and over-attention to their sensations, stopped, then the natural force of the body was sufficient to remove the sources of complaint.
Psychology, Old and New, of Remedies.—Men have always known how to take advantage of the possibility of influencing patients' minds by wondrous claims for remedies. Anyone is sadly deceived who thinks that it is only in recent times that men have learned to make their advertisements of nostrums suggestive by the promises made or that we have developed the psychology of advertising to such a degree as to appeal to the ailing more forcibly and surely than was done in the past. Here is the announcement that went with a remedy in old Irish medicine more than 1,000 years ago. It was, according to its inventor, "a preservative from death, a restorative for the want of sinews (strength), for the tongue-tied, a cure for swelling in the head, and of wounds from iron and of burning by fire, and of the bite of the hound; it preventeth the lassitude of old age, cures the decline, the rupture of the blood vessels, takes away the virulence of the festering sore, the fever of the blood, the poignancy of grief—he to whom it shall be applied shall be made whole." The announcement ended up with the panegyric "extolled be the elixir of life bequeathed by Diancecht to his people; by which everything to which it is applied is made whole." When it is noted that, besides death and loss of muscle power and aphasia and wounds and burns and bites, it also cures old age and consumption (for that is what is meant by decline) and hemorrhages, and probably aneurysms, and fevers and also grief, there are not many modern panaceas that exceed it in power.
Always, as in this Irish announcement of the olden time, the climax of the advertisement is a note of exultant praise for the inventor who has brought such a magnificent blessing to mankind. The ways of the nostrum vender are ever the same.
Roman Nostrums.—How old are all these methods, and how little human nature has changed through all the centuries! The patent medicine men of Rome in the early Christian eras made use of just the same methods that are employed to-day. Friedländer, in his "Roman Life and Manners Under the Early Roman Empire," tells the story well. Many remedies were known by special arbitrary names, instead of descriptive names recalling the ingredients. Sometimes they were named after famous physicians who had used them, or were said to have done so; again, the preparations were named after persons of distinction who actually, or supposedly, were cured thereby, much as, in our own day, cigars are named after poets, statesmen and pugilists. The titles of some of these preparations, for instance, were "Ointment for Gout, Made for Patroculus, Imperial Freedman—Safe Cure"; "Ointment for Aburnius Valens" (probably the famous jurist) called the "Expensive Ointment"; "Eye Salve with Which Florus Cured Antonia, the Wife of Drusus (the Emperor's son) After the Other Doctors