There are many remedies, real or reputed for physical ills, but there
is but one sovereign remedy for body, soul and spirit, namely, the life
of God fully received into the human soul. In an article on “Strange
Medicines,” in the _Nineteenth Century_, Miss Cumming quotes a few
of the healing spells which to this day are practised by the peasantry
of various districts in Great Britain, and which are considered certain
remedies:
The Northumbrian cure for warts is to take a large snail,
rub the wart well with it, and then impale the snail on a
thorn-hedge. As the creature wastes away the warts will surely
disappear. In the west of England eel’s blood serves the same
purpose. For goiter or wen, the hand of a dead child must be
rubbed nine times across the lump, or, still better, the hand of
a suicide may be substituted. In the vicinity of Stamfordham,
in Northumberland, whooping-cough is cured by putting the head
of a live trout into the patient’s mouth, and letting the trout
breathe into the latter. Or else a hairy caterpillar is put
into a small bag and tied around the child’s neck. The cough
ceases as the insect dies. Another cure for whooping-cough is
offerings of hair. In Sunderland the crown of the head is shaved
and the hair hung upon a bush or tree, with the full faith that
as the birds carry away the hair, so will the cough vanish. In
Lincolnshire a girl suffering from the ague cuts a lock of her
hair and binds it around an aspen-tree, praying the latter to
shake in her sted. The remedy for a toothache at Tavistock, in
Devonshire, is to bite a tooth from a skull in the churchyard
and keep it always in the pocket. At Loch Carron, in Ross-shire,
an occasional cure for erysipelas is to cut off half the ear
of a cat and let the blood drip on the inflamed surface. In
Cornwall the treatment for the removal of whelks or small
pimples from the eyelids of children is to pass the tail of a
black cat nine times over the part affected. Toads are made to
do service in divers manners in Cornwall and Northampton for
the cure of nose-bleeding and quinsy, while “toad powder,” or
even a live toad or spider shut up in a box, is still in some
places accounted as useful a charm against contagion as it was
in the days of Sir Kenelm Digby. The old smallpox and dropsy
remedy known as _pulvis Ethiopicus_, was nothing more nor
less than powdered toad. In Devonshire any person bitten by
a viper is advised to kill the creature at once and rub the
wound with its fat. It is said that this practise has survived
in some portions of the United States, where the flesh of the
rattlesnake is accounted the best cure for its own bite. Black,
in his “Folk Medicine,” states that the belief in the power of
snake-skin as a cure for rheumatism still exists in New England.
Such a belief is probably a direct heritage from Britain.
(2675)
* * * * *
The following is the belief of Eastern Jews in very queer remedies:
For hoarseness and complaints of the throat and air-passages an
approved prescription is to take a new plate, write on it with
ink the three mystic names compounded of the Hebrew letters,
“Ain, Yod, Aelph,” “Vau, Teth,” and “Teth, Yod, Koph”; then
wash them out with wine, and after adding three grains of a
citron used at the tabernacle festival, drink the beverage.
Fits, epileptic, and ordinary, are treated after the following
fashion: The patient’s head is covered and a pious neighbor
stands by the bedside while the “practitioner” called in recites
this invocation: “In the name of the Lord of Israel, in the name
of the angel Raphael, and in the name of the hosts of heaven,
and in the name of the One hidden and concealed, I adjure you
to quit the body of So-and-So, the son of So-and-So, to quit
him at once and without doing him hurt; and if you do not go,
I curse you with the curse of the tribunal above and of the
tribunal below, and with the curse of Joshua, the son of Nun.”
In cases of severe prostration and debility, pounded mummy and
human bones are administered, but this is considered a very
dangerous medicine and great precautions are taken to prevent
evil spirits interfering with the patient or hindering his
recovery.--_Public Opinion._
(2676)