The Weapon Salve, and a Physician's Defense

In 1631 an English parson named William Foster attacked Fludd in print over a cure. The weapon salve was a preparation applied not to a wound but to the weapon that made it, the wound itself being merely kept clean and bandaged; sympathy between blade and blood was held to do the healing at a distance. Foster's pamphlet argued the cure was witchcraft in disguise; Fludd's reply defended it as pure natural philosophy, the same magnetic sympathy that moves the compass needle operating between blood on steel and blood in the body.

The exchange displays Fludd's whole cast of mind: nothing for him was inert, the world being knit together by invisible effluxes between macrocosm and microcosm, so that action at a distance was not an anomaly to be explained away but the ordinary behaviour of a living cosmos. It also displays the ambiguous position of such medicine, since the salve's patients recovered, a modern reader would note, precisely because their wounds were cleaned and left alone. Fludd argued the case from an unassailable professional platform: he was a fellow and repeated censor of the College of Physicians, with a fashionable London practice, and among the first English physicians to teach Harvey's circulation of the blood, which he read, characteristically, as the microcosmic image of the sun's circuit. Mystic and establishment doctor were, in him, one person, and the weapon salve was where the two faces argued in public.