The weapon salve, the sympathetic ointment, and the
famous powder of sympathy were the instruments through which it acted.
The magnetic cure of wounds became the vogue. Van Helmont adopted these
views in his famous treatise "De Magnetica Vulnerum Curatione,"(16) in
which he asserted that cures were wrought through magnetic influence.
How close they came to modern views of wound infection may be judged
from the following: "Upon the solution of Unity in any part the ambient
air . . . repleted with various evaporations or aporrhoeas of mixt
bodies, especially such as are then suffering the act of putrefaction,
violently invadeth the part and thereupon impresseth an exotic miasm or
noxious diathesis, which disposeth the blood successively arriving at
the wound, to putrefaction, by the intervention of fermentation." With
his magnetic sympathy, Van Helmont expressed clearly the doctrine of
immunity and the cure of disease by immune sera: "For he who has once
recovered from that disease hath not only obtained a pure balsaamical
blood, whereby for the future he is rendered free from any recidivation
of the same evil, but also infallibly cures the same affection in his
neighbour . . . and by the mysterious power of Magnetism transplants
that balsaam and conserving quality into the blood of another.
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