Note 31 — HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION.
Reading edition
This superstitious notion is not confined to the ancients, but is even cherished at this day, in some of the more remote districts of the kingdom; and we find frequent allusions to it in the popular poetry of the seventeenth century.
“Tom Pots was but a serving man,
But yet he was a doctor good;
He bound his ’kerchief on the wound,
And with some kind words he staunch’d the blood.”
Sir Walter Scott, in his “Lay of the last Minstrel”—
“She drew the splinter from the wound,
And with a charm she staunch’d the blood.”
The reader will also find the enumeration of several charms for this purpose, in Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, p. 273.
We learn also from Sennertus, that the older Surgeons had recourse to prayers and magic for the extraction of foreign bodies from wounds; a very interesting summary of their superstitions, and peculiar notions concerning wounds, will be found in this author, under the head, “De Rebus alienis e vulnere eximendis.” Lib. v. Pars, iv. Practicæ Medicinæ.