Magnetismus Medicinalium

demands back what it has attracted as being friendly to itself, but the belly or stomach, being the friend of neither, weeds them both out by sending them through the intestine; so Rheu[m] is taken not to the extent that it is good for the stomach, but in as much as by stirring up the bilious matter which it collects and unites with itself from all parts of the body it liberates the other organs from a troublesome guest; so just as these entice the humours from the periphery to the centre, so others, apocrustics by sweating, expel them from the centre to the periphery, such as Amber, Bezoar, Spodium [bone ash], Terra sigillata and the like; indeed those which help a particular body part though a certain relatedness of nature turn toward that part from some natural appetite, and are brought in for its good, and to preserve its nature, by some inherent virtue; thus hepatics help the liver, cardiacs the heart, pulmonaries the lung and splenetics the spleen. So the malignity in some medicines corrects by emptying out the malignity of the affected part, while in others it is the goodness which by a singular gift of provident nature defends the goodness of the part against malignity, and strengthens it.

CHAPTER IV

Deleteriomagnetismos or On the Magnetism of Poisons.

Poison here is nothing other than an effective force placed in any body, which is particularly harmful to the heart and in its whole substance dissimilar and directly corrupting to animate life: but what this force may be, or in what it may consist, is a point of great dispute and controversy among authors; some say that poisons act simply through an excess of the primary qualities, so that some do away with a man by constricting the heart through extreme cold, stupefying it and extinguishing the vital heat; others by burning up the heart through intensive heat; others by consuming the vital heat through dryness; others by putrefying through dampness and obstructing the passages. They think therefore, when the motion of the heart is stopped by poisons, that this must necessarily be brought about through some significant imbalance: but there is no imbalance unless from a discrasia [disproportion] of the primary qualities, by which the whole symmetry of the humours is disrupted; so they deduce that the effect of this imbalance can only be from the primary qualities built into the poisoned thing. In refutation, if the action of the poison is to consist solely in an excess of the primary qualities, there will be no reason why pure water, why pepper, why distilled wine,

spirit of sulphur and the like could not be counted as poisonous and destructive. For water is very cold and pepper very hot, and yet they are not poisons; therefore, besides heat and cold, dampness and dryness, another quality is required to bring about those extreme symptoms which we observe in those who have drunk poison. For as Aristotle rightly says (Generation of Animals bk 2, ch 3): There is in seeds a certain faculty of seminal fecundity, and it is heat not fire, and there is no other such faculty; but a spirit is contained in the seed and the spumous body, and the nature which is in that spirit corresponds in proportion to the element of the stars. Thus no poisons kill by cold or by heat, but by some completely amazing cold and heat, which are either bestowed from the stars or rooted in the essence of the universal body; and although there are some poisons, such as narcotics, which appear to kill by cold alone, like Opium, Mandragora, Henbane, Nightshade and Monkshood, yet they do not do it without another additional poisonous quality specific for destruction; of which those rare and wonderful symptoms of the poisoned, which cannot be ascribed to the primary qualities or to cold alone, provide fatal proof. Moreover we observe that poison kills much more quickly than that disproportion of the humours could be induced; Cornelius Gemma reports that this happens in epidemics; thus a certain Ordelalphus, according to Mercuriale, killed those who even came close to him, with a poison with which he was smeared; but I do not deny that the primary qualities contribute, as it were by way of predisposing, to the operation of a poison, and more in one case, less in another: for in order that Scammony taken internally may rarefy, thin and sever, it requires heat; because it does indeed draw to itself the offending humour from all around, nobody will deny the need for another quality of outpouring from inside.

Moreover, as with curatives, so in some proportion there is a varied and manifold abundance of destructives; these I divide into two classes, insofar as some are natural, others artificial. The natural poisons are again variously divided, for some come from minerals, like arsenic, orpiment, antimony, quicksilver and the like: others from plants, like all kinds of Aconite, and narcotics, which are by their whole substance poisonous; others so only in part, such as root, seed or flower. Then there are others derived from animals, comprised of all animals which are poisonous either wholly or in part, which inasmuch as they are countless vary also in the reason for their activity; to these are added poisons which originate from putrefaction or from celestial influx (like epidemic plagues and pestilences),

and again, among the poisons cited, some are taken in as poisonous air, as happens in contagious diseases or from the pestiferous breath of certain animals; others, applied externally, require a bite or sting so that the injected poison may creep through the wound as it heats up, which is how the bites of a rabid dog and of other creeping things impinge on us; others work by being consumed in the guise of food or drink. This, being the most present of all poisons, is therefore the most effective sort of all; for once taken and very rapidly diffused through the lungs into the heart and arteries, it first saps the humours, then the very substance of the limbs. But that which happens by external contact is less effective, since its powers are not held in air or breath, but in some humour carrying it through the organs, such as the bite of a rabid dog, which does not infect a man by inhalation, but discharges saliva, or a venemous humour, into the wound made by the bite, with which afterwards the venom extends its powers by creeping into the whole body. For the rest, inasmuch as poisons of thicker substance are sticky and so weaker, so they do not kill as quickly; lastly others which are taken internally only work when first stimulated by natural heat: the poison of narcotics is of this type. Thus the poison, thinned by some kind of heat, propagates itself through the internal fibres and grievously molests the breath (spirit), and since this has its seat in the heart, the fountain of life, it is no wonder that when that is extinguished the animal should tend to destruction: since it (the spirit) would be opposed to us and to our nutrition in the similitude of the whole substance, as I said before.

§. I.

The Magnetism of Antidotes.

It could justifiably seem a paradox to some how poison might be curable by poison, and how something contrary to our life could grant us life. For it is verified by frequent and almost daily experience that the bites and stings of poisonous animals are healed by the application of the said animals, which I think can happen for no other reason than the Magnetic attraction and confluence of like things, which we also call Magnetism. It should be noted that just as rootstocks and plants are wont, as we have already established, to pull from the earth that which is most consistent with their nature, so also individual animals are drawn by some natural instinct toward the sort of food which is most consistent with the preservation of their nature. Thus since nature has bestowed poison on poisonous animals as it were as particular endowment, both

for their preservation and defence against other animals, and for the purification of the earth and the air, the attracting of poison seems to them simply natural, and something they could not live without. Hence snakes by some natural appetite sucking out, as if for their nutriment, whatever in the ground is poisonous, contagious, putrid and harmful to men (that of course from which they are made) and pulling it to them like a natural wage of poison, absorb it by some affinity of substance just as a man absorbs his food. This you may confirm by the following experiment; for if you rob a snake of his venom and place him for a short time in ground imbued with a poisonous quality, although at first he lacked all venom, you will now find him totally virulent by means of the venom he has attracted anew; for this reason then Vipers, by some wondrous providence of God, acquire for themselves toxin from the ground, Dypsas from the water and Spiders from the air in a twofold service, as they remove what is harmful to us and draw to themselves what is beneficial to them; so caterpillars, butterflies and the other insects also take into themselves the noxious qualities in plants, fruit and flowers; and that indeed is how all amulets, prophylactics and antidotes draw poisons. So it is natural for venemous animals to attract poison, it being by a certain relatedness of substance similar to themselves, as beneficial and suitable nourishment[?] So a sun-dried toad (Bufo or Rubeta) applied to pestiferous tubers is confirmed by frequent use to free an infected person from plague, the toad's body evidently drawing up the man's contagious humour as being appropriate and convenient to it, while nature itself strives to drive it from him as being noxious and lethal. For as such animals are often found bred in graves from the putrefied humour of a corpse, so they naturally seek out that, from which they are made, which is contagious and corrupt in the human body. Thus viper meat when eaten cures the bite of a viper, as does scorpion that of a scorpion. For which there is no other reason than that Magnetic attraction, by which like seeks out like. For when someone is bitten by a venemous animal, the venom soon seeks to creep into the internal fibres: if therefore you give the patient to eat the meat of the viper which had bitten him, it makes the venom abandon the alien and incompatible environment and seek out again that to which it is led by a natural appetite as its own, namely the flesh of the viper, and cling to that as its natural environment, while the whole army of the parts of the body conspires against a common enemy in eventually expelling it together with the venoms combined in a poisonous mass. So viper flesh is attractive of its venom, and thus in the preparation of theriac it is the basis of all the species, as we will be see later.

By this method, when a certain Seplasarius (perfumer or spice-merchant) in Erfurt in Germany was brought to the very brink of his life by a viper's bite, when all antidotes had been tried and no other remedies for fighting off the venom remained I saw him completely cured by eating the meat of the same viper that had bitten him: and so a scorpion when applied to the wound claims back as its own the venom it has emitted from its sting; indeed poisons for the most part, far from being lethal to the victim, are found to be utterly curative; because it deserves to be considered among nature's greatest miracles, I shall now add one thing concerning the curing of desperate diseases which commonly occurs in the cave of serpents, which because it is prodigious and exotic I have decided to append here for the gratification of the assiduous reader.

§. II.

Of the cave of serpents and its wonders.

If you go from Rome to Bracciano, and there turn off for six miles towards the winter solstice sunset, you find Stigliano, or the Stygian waters, which are so called because at certain times they exhale such an unendurable stench as to bring death not only to men, but also to animals of every sort and to birds if they ever happen to fly over them. It is an awful place in the middle of a wood, in a valley closed on all sides in the shape of a cauldron, which by its sulphurous smell betrays itself to those standing as much as a whole mile away: in the centre of this valley sulphurous water gushes straight up from the bowels of the earth in the form of a column with such vehemence and force as to strike terror into onlookers; the ground around it is all trembling and, from the waters boiling up through fissures, it shows clear signs of a hidden underground fire: continuing from here for two miles along some ruins, which I think are the traces of the old Roman settlement of Alsium, you get to a mountain beside a Villa which, after a precipitous overhanging rock, is commonly called Sasso, under the rule and jurisdiction of the Patritii, a most distinguished and ancient Roman family. On this mountain top (which on the west side faces toward the sea and the castle of Santa Severa, and on the east, as I have said, toward Bracciano eight miles away) can be found a house with three huts, each big enough for a man, once built for use as baths by the illustrious Signor Antonio Ursino, whence they are also commonly called 'Fumarola', or you could say 'vapour chambers': for certain hot exhalations perpetually issue from the bowels of the mountain, and the huts, heated by them, serve instead of baths.