Here is another story about something akin to Animal Magnetism, which is copied from a contemporary periodical:
In the siege of Breda in 1625, the garrison had the scurvy. The Prince of Orange, unable to relieve the place, sent in, by a confidential messenger, a preparation to be added to a quantity of water, and given as a specific for the epidemic. The garrison recovered its health, but it was afterwards acknowledged that the curative in question was only a little coloring matter.
Homer says that the bleeding of Ulysses was stopped by a charm. Cato wrote an incantation for the restoration of a dislocated limb. Sir Walter Scott writes, in the Lay of the Last Minstrel:
She drew the splinter from the wound,
And with a charm she staunched the blood.
Whatsoever spark
Of pure and true in any human heart
Flickered and lived, it burned itself towards Him.
