n. A motion of the hand, or a glance of the eye, will throw a weak and
credulous patient into a fit; and a pill made of bread, if taken with
sufficient faith, will operate a cure better than all the drugs in the
pharmacopoeia. The Prince of Orange, at the siege of Breda, in 1625, cured
all his soldiers, who were dying of the scurvy, by a philanthropic piece
of quackery, which he played upon them with the knowledge of the
physicians, when all other means had failed.[64] Many hundreds of
instances, of a similar kind, might be related, especially from the
history of witchcraft. The mummeries, strange gesticulations, and
barbarous jargon of witches and sorcerers, which frightened credulous and
nervous women, brought on all those symptoms of hysteria and other similar
diseases, so well understood now, but which were then supposed to be the
work of the Devil, not only by the victims and the public in general, but
by the operators themselves.

[64] See Van der Mye's account of the siege of Breda. The
garrison, being afflicted with scurvy, the Prince of Orange
sent the physicians two or three small phials, containing a
decoction of camomile, wormwood, and camphor, telling them to
pretend that it was a medicine of the greatest value and
extremest rarity, which had been procured with very much
danger and difficulty from the East; and so strong, that two
or three drops would impart a healing virtue to a gallon of
water. The soldiers had faith in their commander; they took
the medicine with cheerful faces, and grew well rapidly. They
afterwards thronged about the prince in groups of twenty and
thirty at a time, praising his skill, and loading him with
protestations of gratitude.

In the age when alchymy began to fall into some disrepute, and learning to
lift up its voice against it, a new delusion, based upon this
power of imagination, suddenly arose, and found apostles among all the
alchymists. Numbers of them, forsaking their old pursuits, made themselves
magnetisers. It appeared first in the shape of mineral, and afterwards of
animal, magnetism, under which latter name it survives to this day, and
numbers its dupes by thousands.

The mineral magnetisers claim the first notice, as the worthy predecessors
of the quacks of the present day. The honour claimed for Paracelsus, of
being the first of the Rosicrucians, has be