A closer look
Weapon salve was a highly popular mystical medical treatment in seventeenth-century Europe based on the concept of sympathetic magic, which dictated that if you got stabbed with a sword, the doctor wouldn't bandage your bleeding wound, but would instead carefully apply healing ointment to the weapon that hurt you. People completely believed that an invisible magnetic spiritual connection existed between the blood and the blade, so while the patient sat there bleeding out, the physician was across the room gently wrapping the sword in clean bandages and rubbing herbs on the metal. Surprisingly, patients who used this magical method often survived at higher rates than those who used traditional medicine, purely because the traditional doctors weren't pouring boiling oil into the wounds, allowing the body to just heal naturally. It is a fantastic example of doing the completely wrong magical thing but accidentally getting the right biological result
