Quiz for the day.

The Mediaeval Magician/Doctor called Paracelcus once invented a medicine he called the "Weapon Salve". This worked on the principles of sympathetic magic - if a person were harmed by a weapon or similar object, then the weapon would be coated in the salve and bandaged and treated. The power of sympathetic magic would cause the healing opwer of the salve to tranfer itself to the would inflicted, facilitating recovery. If the weapon that inflicted the wound could not be identified or recovered, then another weapon would be touched to the wound and treated accordingly.

Interestingly, injured patients treated in this way would often recover far more quickly - and stand a better chance of recovery from their wounds - than those simply treated in the ordinary fashion. Why was this?

A drink for the first full correct answer.

To put you out of your misery.

Paracelsus and his contemporaries noticed that a wound produced pus whilst it was healing. They reasoned that pus must be part of the bodys curative process, and so added irritants to open wounds to stimulate the production of pus ("goodly pus", as it was called). These stimulants included broken eggshells and sand.

When Paracelsus wrote of keeping the wound clean and nature doing the rest, he was in fact referring to natural magic, the system wherein everything had corresponents. The correspondent of the wound in this case being the weapon that had caused it. But using the curative power of pus-stimulating agents, plus the magical power of the correspondant weapon, it was believed that this would stimulate healing even more than either of the two on their own.

In the process, they stopped putting eggshells & sand in wounds and started putting them on swords instead, with comensurate benefits to the healing patient.

Nooooooooooooooo!

The only day of the year so far when I have enough work to mean that I couldn't possibly go home early...

We're told we can go at 3:30pm for the Jubilee if we like.

Bollocks!