In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries these doctrines of sympathies and antipathies were much in vogue.

A Scotchman, Sylvester Rattray, edited in the "Theatrum Sympatheticum"(15) all the writings upon the sympathies and antipathies of man with animal, vegetable and mineral substances, and the whole art of physics was based on this principle.
(15) Rattray: Theatrum Sympatheticum, Norimberge, MDCLXII.
Upon this theory of "mumia," or magnetic force, the sympathetic cure of disease was based.

The weapon salve, the sympathetic ointment, and the famous powder of sympathy were the instruments through which it acted.
The magnetic cure of wounds became the vogue.

Van Helmont adopted these views in his famous treatise "De Magnetica Vulnerum Curatione,"(16) in which he asserted that cures were wrought through magnetic influence.
How close they came to modern views of wound infection may be judged from the following: "Upon the solution of Unity in any part the ambient air.

.