The first meaning of “charm” is chant or incantation. We look at healing charms from Romania, Spain, Finland, and Bulgaria and how imagery is used to dispell illness from the body-soul.
The first example of this I found is from Romania, where “the Mother of God orders the pain to leave the patient, banishing the “lords and ladies of disease” with this command, uttered through the healer’s voice: “Go and hide where black cocks never crow, where men never go, where no beast roars.” [Leland 1891: 37]
In a Bulgarian version, the illnesses caused by the evil eye are “scattered like foam over the sea, like rain over the plain, like wind through the forest; may they go to distant wilderness, where no stork builds its nest, where no swallow ever sings, where no dog ever barks.”
The healer Maria la Medina (convicted of witchcraft by the Spanish Inquisition) smoked her patients with herbs while repeating the verse, “Go there, evil, to the part of the sea, where neither cock nor hen crows; don’t stay in this house, in this home.”
More examples in this audio stream, which also talks about rites with water and fire in conjunction with the charms.