The Magnet In Medicine

The remarkable properties of the natural magnet, its capacity for action without contact, and the respective attracting and repelling powers of its two poles, have greatly impressed the imagination of mankind from a very early date; and, as Richer, 2 Binet, and Fere have pointed out, the assumption that the magnet possessed some mysterious influence on the body, capable of being turned to account in the cure of disease, was prevalent in the Middle Ages. Magnetic rings were worn to cure nervous, diseases, and the electrotherapeutio frauds,, follies, and delusions which are so rampant in the present day can boast a very ancient history of trickery, credulity, and folly. Electric rings, belts, and boxes were hung round the body in the time of Caedon. Paracelsus characteristically taught (that the human body was endowed with a doable magnetism - that one portion attracted to itself the planets, and was nourished by them, whence came wisdom, thought, and the senses; that the other portion attracted to itself the elements, and disintegrated them, whence came flesh and blood; that the attractive and hidden virtue of man resembles those of amber and of the magnet, and that by this virtue the magnetic virtue of healthy persons attracts the enfeebled magnetism'of those who are sick.1

1 Reprinted from the British Medical Journal.

2 Richer, Bulletin de la Socists de Biologic May 80th, 1884, Paul Richer. Nouvelle Revue, August 1st, 1882. Binet and Fere, Animal Magnetiim, 1888.