On the Magnet, by William Gilbert

CHAP. XIIII.

Concerning other powers of loadstone, and its
medicinal properties.

ioscorides prescribes loadstone to be given with sweetened water, three scruples' weight, to expel gross humours. Galen writes that a like quantity of bloodstone avails. Others relate that loadstone perturbs the mind and makes folk melancholick, and mostly kills. Gartias ab Horto⁸⁷ thinks it not deleterious or injurious to health. The natives of East India tell us, he says, that loadstone taken in small doses preserves youth. On which account the aged king, Zeilam, is said to have ordered the pans in which his victuals were cooked to be made of loadstone. The person (says he) to whom this order was given told me so himself. There are many varieties of loadstone produced by differences in the mingling of earths, metals, and juices; hence they are altogether unlike in their virtues and effects, due to propinquities of places and of agnate bodies, and arising from the pits themselves as it were from the matrices being soul. One loadstone is therefore able to purge the stomach, and another to check purging, to cause by its fumes a serious shock to the mind, to produce a gnawing at the vitals, or to bring on a grave relapse; in case of which ills they exhibit gold and emerald, using an abominable imposture for lucre. Pure loadstone may, indeed, be not only harmless, but even able to correct an over-fluid and putrescent state of the bowels and bring them back to a better temperament; of this sort usually are the oriental magnets from China, and the denser ones from Bengal, which are neither misliking nor unpleasant to the actual senses. Plutarch and Claudius Ptolemy⁸⁸, and all the copyists since their time, think that a loadstone smeared with garlick does not allure iron. Hence some suspect that garlick is of avail against any deleterious power of the magnet: thus in philosophy many false and idle conjectures arise from fables and falsehoods. Some physicians⁸⁹ have that a loadstone has power to extract the iron of an arrow from the human body. But it is when whole that the loadstone draws, not when pulverized and formless, buried in plasters; for it does not attract by reason of its material, but is rather adapted for the healing of open wounds, by reason of exsiccation, closing up and drying the sore, an effect by which the arrow-heads would rather be retained in the wounds. Thus vainly and preposterously do the sciolists look for remedies while ignorant of the true causes of things. The application of a loadstone for all sorts of headaches no more cures them (as some make out) than would an iron helmet or a steel cap. To give it in a draught to dropsical persons is an error of the ancients, or an impudent tale of the copyists, though one kind of ore may be found which, like many more minerals, purges the stomach; but this is due to some defect of that ore and not to any magnetick property. Nicolaus puts a large quantity of loadstone into his divine plaster⁹⁰, just as the Augsburgers do into a black plaster⁹¹ for fresh wounds and stabs; the virtue of which dries them up without smart, so that it proves an efficacious medicament. In like manner also Paracelsus to the same end mingles it in his plaster for stab wounds⁹².