Signatures.

Signatures. THE DOCTRINE OF, an inveterate belief in early medicine that plants and minerals bore certain symbolical marks which indicated the diseases for which nature had intended them as special remedies. These figures, of course, were not the result of chance, but the evidence of Providence, being really the characters and figures of those stars by whom they are principally governed and endowed with particular virtues. And the doctrine brings us into the wider region of magic in its fundamental confusion between an object and its image, the word and its idea. Many names witness to a belief in this theory, as mandrake, kidneywort, scorpion-grass, and the Euphrasia or eyebright. In the case of the last, for example, the plant was supposed to be good for the eyes, because of a black pupil-like spot in its corolla; and by an analogous process of thought the yellow turmeric was thought good for jaundice, the bloodstone for stopping bleeding. Similarly white things were regarded as refrigerant, red as hot. So in smallpox red bed-coverings were used, with the view of bringing the pustules to the surface of the body; red things were to be looked upon by the patient; burnt purple, pomegranate seeds, mulberries, and other red ingredients were dissolved in his drink. John of Gaddesden, physician to Edward II., directs his patients to be wrapped up in scarlet dresses, and claims by this means to have recovered the young prince quickly from an attack of smallpox. Wraxall, in his Memoirs, tells us that this was done so late as 1765 with the Emperor Francis I. when ill with smallpox. See PLANTS, Vol. VIII. p. 222; and T. J. Pettigrew, On Superstitions connected with Medicine and Surgery (1844).