sympathetic powder

English edit

Noun edit

sympathetic powder (countable and uncountable, plural sympathetic powders)

  1. (alchemy, historical) A kind of powder supposed to be able to cure a wound if applied to the weapon that inflicted it, or to a portion of the bloodied clothes of the wounded person.

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for sympathetic powder”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)