the merchant's verdict The diamond bright, the Saphire brave, are stones that beare the name, But flatter not, and tell the troath, Magnes deserves the same."*
It
was reported in the seventeenth century that ruptures were cured in
Belgium by the help of the loadstone. The patient was first given a
dose of iron filings, reduced to a very fine powder ; thereupon a
plaster made of crushed loadstone was applied externally to the
affected part. This was said to produce a cure in the space of eight
days.119 Probably the plaster was believed to draw the iron
filings or some emanation from them through the affected parts toward
the surface.
In
medieval Europe this mineral was greatly valued for its therapeutic
virtues. Trotula, the first of the female physicians connected with the
celebrated School of Salerno, the centre of medical culture in Europe
in the Middle Ages, and who wrote a treatise on female diseases,
recommended the use of the loadstone in childbirth. The stone was to be
held in the right hand, and the learned lady asserted that the wearing
of a coral necklace would aid its beneficent effect. Both these
substances are prescribed for this use by the Oxford teacher, John
Gadesden (1300), in his "Rosa Anglica." Francisco Piemontese, who
taught in Naples about 1340, also recommends the loadstone, but he
directs that it be strewn with the ashes obtained by burning the hoof
of an ass or a horse; according to this last authority, the stone
should be held in the left hand.120
That
wounds caused by burning could be healed if powdered loadstone were
sprinkled over them was confidently taught even in the seventeenth
century. However, some ill effects were occasionally remarked when the
substance was used medicinally, for it sometimes produced melancholia.
"*
From Robert Norman's " The Newe Attractive," London, 1581. "*
Aldrovandi, " Museum metallicum," Bononiae, 1648, p. 566. « Ploss, "Das
Weib," Leipzig, 1895, vol. ii, p. 350.
