Animal Magnetism: Absorption and Attraction in Early Modern Recipes

Puppies make good pets, but did you know they also make good medicines, at least according to the early modern recipe books at the Folger Shakespeare Library? When faced with the heavy burden of sickness, some practitioners suggested using such young, sweet animals to absorb or attract a patient’s illness.

The transfer of disease from the original sufferer to a new host is vividly described in one recipe, “to know a secret or hydden Dysease,” as follows (V.a.140, fol. 18r):

The user was instructed to lay a live, new-born puppy next to the patient’s side for a course of three days. At once a test and a tonic, the purpose of the recipe was to both discover a secret ailment and heal it. The mechanics of the recipe rested on the deeply intimate form of contact established between puppy and patient in the closeness of touch, sleep, and a shared drink of milk, still swimming with the saliva of the sick! The author promised that if the patient was indeed ill, the puppy would absorb that disease, embracing a notion that living animals could exercise a powerful magnetic force that drew disease to them. As the author attests, the puppy will drain the patient of their sickness, eventually succumbing to it. In turn, the inside of the puppy’s dead body will be marked with infection, visually confirming the presence of disease and its successful transplant to the unlucky animal.

The English naturalist Edward Topsell described a similar treatment in his 1607 bestiary, The Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes (STC 24123 copy 2, 188):

The significance of such remedies of displacement and absorption lies in the assumption that disease could move beyond the boundaries of the human body and become lodged in another material substance. While this procedure may seem more magical than medical, it made sense within the framework of early modern healing. It recalls the principles of sympathetic medicine, a branch of early modern medical practice that believed certain objects and beings shared a hidden connection, or “sympathy,” with one another. Along these lines, the author and subsequent users of these puppy recipes may have believed that the physical proximity of the two bodies established their sympathetic bond, allowing an invisible force to draw the corruption into the smaller, weaker animal.

Other explanations appealed to a logic that originated in humoral medicine, which explained health through the balance of four elemental bodily fluids, called humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Practitioners posited the puppy’s natural heat encouraged proper circulation in the body, helping to redirect any accumulating fluids. English Physician John Caius in his treatise Of Englishe Dogges (1576) theorized as much when he argued spaniels applied to the midsection were a good cure for ailments of the stomach. On account of their “moderate heat,” the dog would absorb the illness and sometimes die as the patient recovered (22).

Applying a warm, lively animal to key parts of the patient’s body could therefore be understood as helping to restore proper balance, much like applying a warm compress to sooth an aggravated site. Topsell recorded another puppy recipe that captures this same idea: “If a Whelpe be cut asunder aliue, and layed vpon the head of a mad melancholike Woman, it shall help her” (188). In accordance with other contemporary treatments for melancholy, a disease of persistent sadness or anxiety, the puppy’s warmth was thought to thin out the build-up of cold, melancholic humors in the head, caused by an overabundance of black bile. The recipe book of Catherin Bacon similarly presented the whole animal body split in half as a kind of plaster. Her recipe to cure a wound advised “chickens or whelps cut alive in halves and laid to the swelling” (V.a.621, leaf 4r).

One anonymous recipe writer took these practices to new extremes in a recipe to cure rickets (V.b.286, 157-58), a childhood bone disorder caused by vitamin deficiency:

Instructing the user to sever the head and legs of the poor puppy, the author advised binding the neck of its limbless body to the child’s armpits and its belly to the child’s side. It is unclear exactly how the recipe was believed to work, but most likely it was a resulting combination of the sympathetic and humoral reasonings above. Especially evocative is the recommendation to use the animal “before the life be gone out,” suggesting that the puppy’s lingering life force was thought to make it a more efficacious cure. The author goes on to recommend holding the dead animal for twelve hours, if only one could endure the abominable stink!

Whether by some force of sympathy, magnetism, or warmth, animal bodies were believed to act as subtle sponges capable of absorbing outside illness. Swapping these animal lives for those of their patients, users were quick to capitalize on the supposed profits of medical transference. For us animal-lovers today, this trade might not have been so easy.