One factor leading to success may have been that in the directions which Digby gave for treating the wound (in the celebrated case of James Howell, for instance), it was to be let alone and kept clean.

The practice is alluded to very frequently by the poets.
In the "Lay of the Last Minstrel" we find the following: (17) French edition, 1668, English translation, same year.

For a discussion on the author of the weapon salve see Van Helmont, who gives the various formulas.

Highmore (1651) says the "powder is a Zaphyrian salt calcined by a celestial fire operating in Leo and Cancer into a Lunar complexion." But she has ta'en the broken lance, And wash'd it from the clotted gore, And salved the splinter o'er and o'er.
William of Deloraine, in trance, Whene'er she turn'd it round and round, Twisted, as if she gall'd his wound, Then to her maidens she did say, That he should be whole man and sound, (Canto iii, xxiii.) and in Dryden's "Tempest" (V, 1) Ariel says: Anoint the Sword which pierc'd him with the Weapon-Salve, And wrap it close from Air till I have time To visit him again.
From Van Helmont comes the famous story of the new nose that dropped off in sympathy with the dead arm from which it was taken, and the source of the famous lines of Hudibras.

As I have not seen the original story quoted of late years it may be worth while to give it: "A certain inhabitant of Bruxels, in a combat had his nose mowed off, addressed himself to Tagliacozzus, a famous Chirurgein, living at Bononia, that he might procure a new one; and when he feared the incision of his own arm, he hired a Porter to admit it, out of whose arm, having first given the reward agreed upon, at length he dig'd a new nose.