Cures

To recover health within the humoral system was to regain humoral balance; “spring cures” (i.e., seasonal purging, sweating, or bloodletting) rested on this logic. Oppositions (hot/cold, wet/dry) could explain both the occurrence of disease and the path to a cure. Sympathetic healing had a similar logic: “People sought to expel their diseases by transferring them to other objects. . . if one rubbed a wart with the cut side of an onion and then buried the onion, the wart would shrivel as the onion rotted. As late as the eighteenth century, stories circulated about peasants who brought sheep into the bedroom of fever patients so as to transfer the fever from the human to the beast” (Lindermann, loc 143-145).