Sympathetic
SYMPATHET'IC
SYMPATHET'ICAL, adjective See Sympathy.]
1. Pertaining to sympathy.
2. Having common feeling with another; susceptible of being affected by feelings like those of another, or of feelings inconsequence of what another feels; as a sympathetic heart.
3. Among physicians, produced by sympathy. A sympathetic disease is one which is produced by sympathy, or by a remote cause, as when a fever follows a local injury. In this case, the word is opposed to idiopathetic, which denotes a disease produced by a proximate cause, or an original disease. Thus an epilepsy is sympathetic when it is produced by some other disease.
4. Among chimists and alchimists, an epithet applied to a kind of powder, possessed of the wonderful property that if spread on a cloth dipped in the blood of a wound, the wound will be healed, though the patient is at a distance. This opinion is discarded as charlatanry.
This epithet is given also to a species of ink or liquor, with which a person may write letters which are not visible till something else is applied.
5. In anatomy, sympathetic is applied to two nerves, from the opinion that their communications are the cause of sympathies. One of these is the great intercostal nerve; the other is the facial nerve.