It was widely believed that disease could be transferred by means
of certain silly formalities. This was a very ancient notion. Pliny
explains how pains in the stomach could be transferred to a duck or a
puppy. A prescription of about two hundred years ago for the cure of
convulsions was to take parings of the sick man’s nails, some hair from
his eyebrows, and a halfpenny, and wrap them all in a clout which had
been round his head. This package must be laid in a gateway where four
lanes meet, and the first person who opened it would take the sickness
and relieve the patient of it. A certain John Dougall was prosecuted
in Edinburgh in 1695 for prescribing this treatment. A more gruesome
but less unjust proceeding was to transfer the disease to the dead.
An example is the treatment of boils quoted from Mr. W. G. Black’s
“Folk Medicine.” The boil was to be poulticed three days and nights,
after which the poultices and cloths employed were to be placed in the
coffin with a dead person and buried with the corpse. In Lancashire
warts could be transferred by rubbing each with a cinder which must be
wrapped in paper and laid where four roads meet. As before, the person
who opens this parcel will take the warts from the present owner. In
Devonshire a child could be cured of whooping cough by putting one
of its hairs between slices of bread and butter and giving these to
a dog. If the dog coughed, as was probable, the whooping cough was
transferred.