" Those with light
horoscopes are specially prone to incurable complaints, but much harm
can be averted if such an individual be surrounded with exorcising
objects, if he be given proper amulets to wear and proper medicines to
swallow, and by selecting for him auspicious days and hours.
Two or three special points may be referred to. The doctrine of the
pulse reached such extraordinary development that the whole practice
of the art centred round its different characters. There were scores
of varieties, which in complication and detail put to confusion the
complicated system of some of the old Graeco-Roman writers. The basic
idea seems to have been that each part and organ had its own proper
pulse, and just as in a stringed instrument each chord has its own tone,
so in the human body, if the pulses were in harmony, it meant health; if
there was discord, it meant disease. These Chinese views reached
Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and there is a very
elaborate description of them in Floyer's well-known book.(27) And the
idea of harmony in the pulse is met with into the eighteenth century.
(27) Sir John Floyer: The Physician's Pulse Watch, etc.,
London, 1707.
Organotherapy was as extensively practiced in China as in Egypt.
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