Weapon-salve

Pharmacognosy & Toxicology

Constituents

• vitriolof Digby’s powder of sympathy, dissolved in water with the blood-stained garter laid in it
• moss from a skull, mummy, human fat, bloodstonein the ointment, by Fludd’s and Bacon’s accounts
• nothing applied to the woundwhich was washed and bound

Mechanism

The salve went on the weapon and the wound was washed, bound, and left alone; Foster himself argued that a wound kept clean “will cicatrice without his Weapon-Salve.” In Digby’s cure the vitriol never touched the patient: the bloody garter lay in vitriol water, and the wounded man was told to cast away his plasters and keep the wound clean. Francis Bacon set down the claims, though “not fully inclined to beleeve it,” and liked best that it would cure a beast as well as a man, because that “subiecteth the Matter, to an Easie Triall.”

Toxic dose

None reached the patient.

Standing

The clearest case in the Materia Medica of a remedy that worked by doing nothing; see the clinical reading.

• Digby, K. (1658). A Late Discourse Touching the Cure of Wounds by the Powder of Sympathy. Read in full · the text read

Constituent names open the compound’s record at PubChem, and “ChEMBL” beside a name opens its record at ChEMBL, the European Bioinformatics Institute’s database of bioactive molecules. Where a mechanism line was checked against ChEMBL (ChEMBL 37, read 1 October 2026), the check is shown with the measured value and its source paper, or says plainly that nothing has been measured. Doses are as the references give them, for description only; this is not medical advice. Each source carries the result of its check against Crossref, PubMed, or the authority’s page: see Verification.