{"id":1502,"date":"2009-09-14T08:13:02","date_gmt":"2009-09-14T14:13:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/hardin\/?p=1502"},"modified":"2009-09-14T08:13:02","modified_gmt":"2009-09-14T14:13:02","slug":"notes-from-the-rare-book-room-wrap-up-the-sword-and-call-me-in-the-morning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/hardin\/2009\/09\/14\/notes-from-the-rare-book-room-wrap-up-the-sword-and-call-me-in-the-morning\/","title":{"rendered":"Notes from the Rare Book Room “Wrap up the Sword and Call me in the Morning”"},"content":{"rendered":"

But she has taen the broken lance,
\nAnd washed it from the clotted gore,
\nAnd salved the splinter o’er and o’er.<\/span>
\n\u2014Sir Walter Scott: Lay of the Last Minstrel\u20141805<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>The notion that wounds ca<\/a>n be healed from a distance dates back hundreds, perhaps thousands of years and is retained in some folk remedies today. <\/span>However, the idea reached its zenith in the form of <\/span>weapon salve or , <\/span>Unguentum armariu, <\/span> <\/span>the origin of which goes back at least as far as the Swiss physician-iconoclast Paracelsus (1493-1541). <\/span>The idea was simple: <\/span>rather than dressing the wound, the physician applies salve to the weapon that caused it while the wound is simply washed and left unattended. <\/span>Among the many variants of the recipe is the following:<\/span><\/p>\n

Take skull-mosse, two ounces, mummy, halfe an ounce, mans fat, two ounces, mans blood, halfe an ounce, linseed oyle, two drames, oyle of roses, and bole armoniack, of each one ounce. <\/span>Mixe them together and make an oybtment: <\/span>into the which hee puts a stick, depp\u2019d in the blood of the woundd person, and dryed, and bindeth up the wound with a rowler dept every day in the hot urine of the of the wounded person. <\/span>The annoointing of the weapon hee addes moreover; honey, one ounce, bulls fat, one drame.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

While the treatment appears farcical to the modern mind, there was considerable support among many serious philosophers of the 16<\/span>th<\/sup><\/span> and 17 centuries. <\/span>Even Francis Bacon (1561\u20141626), while skeptical, stopped well short of dismissing the idea out of hand. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Robert Fludd<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The firmest adherent was Robert Fludd (1574-1637), English physician and mystic who explained <\/span>that the salve worked as a result <\/span>of the \u201cmystical anatomy of the blood.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Some of Fludd\u2019s contemporaries pronounced the salve to be nonsensical while others condemned it as the devil\u2019s work. <\/span>Later writers, <\/span>most notably, Oliver Wendell Holmes, have suggested that anointing the weapon rather than the wound <\/span>simply allowed the tissue the chance to heal naturally.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>The weapon salve fell out of favor by the 18<\/span>th<\/sup><\/span> century it but remains as one of the more curious episodes in the history of medicine.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

But she has taen the broken lance, And washed it from the clotted gore, And salved the splinter o’er and o’er. \u2014Sir Walter Scott: Lay of the Last Minstrel\u20141805 The notion that wounds can be healed from a distance dates back hundreds, perhaps thousands of years and is retained in some folk remedies today. However,Continue reading “Notes from the Rare Book Room “Wrap up the Sword and Call me in the Morning””<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":172,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,15,17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/hardin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1502"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/hardin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/hardin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/hardin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/172"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/hardin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/hardin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1502\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/hardin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/hardin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/hardin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}