To put you out of your misery.

[davywavy]

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.

Comments

[onyxtears.livejournal.com]

told you it was magic!