(14)
(14) Robert Fludd, the Mystical Physician, British Medical
Journal, London, 1897, ii, 408.
The doctrine of contraries drawn from the old Greek philosophy,
upon which a good deal of the treatment of Hippocrates and Galen was
based--dryness expelled by moisture, cold by heat, etc.--was opposed by
Paracelsus in favor of a theory of similars, upon which the practice of
homeopathy is based. This really arose from the primitive beliefs, to
which I have already referred as leading to the use of eyebright in
diseases of the eye, and cyclamen in diseases of the ear because of its
resemblance to that part; and the Egyptian organotherapy had the same
basis,--spleen would cure spleen, heart, heart, etc. In the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries these doctrines of sympathies and antipathies
were much in vogue. A Scotchman, Sylvester Rattray, edited in the
"Theatrum Sympatheticum"(15) all the writings upon the sympathies and
antipathies of man with animal, vegetable and mineral substances, and
the whole art of physics was based on this principle.
(15) Rattray: Theatrum Sympatheticum, Norimberge, MDCLXII.
Upon this theory of "mumia," or magnetic force, the sympathetic cure of
disease was based.
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