death and the grave.—sorcerer’s ointment.—teeth-worms.-disease transference.—doctrine of signatures.
superstitions connected with death and the grave.
there is a very common saying amongst ignorant persons, when they suddenly shudder without reason, that some one is walking over their grave. in new england it is believed that cramp in the feet can be cured by walking over a grave. earth taken at midnight from a newly made grave is believed in some parts of england to have a curative effect. crawling round newly made graves is thought useful in sickness in devonshire. churchyard grass has been used (as what has not?) as an antidote to hydrophobia. even in afghanistan graves have a reputation for curing diseases.977
“in the middle ages the necromancers profaned tombs and compounded philtres and ointments with the grease and blood of corpses; they mixed aconite, belladonna, and poisonous fungi therewith; then they boiled and skimmed these frightful mixtures over fires composed of human remains and crucifixes stolen from churches; they added the dust of dried toads and the ashes of consecrated hosts; then they rubbed their foreheads, hands, and stomachs with the infernal ointment, drew the satanic pentacle, and evoked the dead beneath gibbets or in desecrated cemeteries.”978
baptista porta gives the recipe for the sorceress’ ointment in his natural magic. by means of this charm the witches were carried to their sabbath. it was composed of children’s fat, of aconite boiled with poplar leaves, and some other drugs; soot must be mixed with these, and the bodies of the sorceresses rubbed all over with the compound as they went to the sabbath naked. another recipe from the works of the same author runs thus:—
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recipe—suim, acorum vulgare, pentaphyllon, vespertillionis sanguinem, solanum somniferum et oleum, the whole to be well boiled and stirred to the consistence of an ointment.979
bits of the rope and chips from the gallows after the hanging of a criminal have long had a reputation in england as cures for headache and ague. the touch of a dead man’s hand at the place of execution was formerly considered very efficacious for some complaints.
dyer says that between suffolk and norfolk a favourite remedy for whooping-cough is to put the head of the suffering child into a hole made in a meadow for a few minutes. it must be done in the evening, with only the father and mother to witness it.980
a knife that has killed a man is an amulet worn against disease in china. a piece of skin taken with a black-handled knife from a male corpse which has been buried nine days is an irish love charm.981
people in north hampshire sometimes wear a tooth taken from a corpse, kept in a little bag, and hung round the neck, as a remedy for toothache. bones from churchyards have from old times been used as charms against disease. coffin water is considered good for warts, and the water with which a corpse has been washed has been recently given to a man in glasgow as a remedy for fits.982
teeth worms.
a very curious remedy for toothache is founded on the idea that the disease is caused by a worm, and that henbane seed roasted will extract the worm. the englishman’s doctor; or the school of salerne, an english translation of a book published in 1607, has a few lines on this superstition which run thus:—
“if in your teeth you hap to be tormented,
by meane some little wormes therein do breed,
which pain (if heed be tane) may be prevented,
be keeping cleane your teeth, when as you feede;
burne francomsence (a gum not evil sented),
put henbane unto this, and onyon seed,
and with a tunnel to the tooth that’s hollow,
convey the smoke thereof, and ease shall follow.”983
every druggist even at the present day sells henbane seed for the same purpose; it is used by sprinkling it on hot cinders. the heat causes the seed to sprout, and an appearance similar to a maggot is produced, which is ignorantly supposed by the purchaser of the drug to have dropped from the tooth to which the smoke is applied. very415 strangely this belief that toothache is caused by a worm is found all over the world.984
that dental caries is actually caused by an organism (the leptothrix buccalis), which is found in teeth slime, and the threads of which penetrate the tissue of the teeth after the enamel has been eaten away by acids generated by the fermentation of the food, is not of course known to peasants and ignorant persons; they seem, however, to have in this instance anticipated a discovery in bacteriology.
disease transference.
when primitive folk found that diseases could be communicated from one person to another, that contagious and infectious complaints spread through a district with terrible rapidity and fatal effects, they began to argue that it must be possible to transfer diseases to other creatures than man. and so we find stomach-ache transferred from the patient to a puppy or a duck.985 hooping-cough is transmitted to dogs by hairs of the patient given between slices of bread-and-butter. ague and scarlet-fever are transmitted to the ass on which the sufferer sits; toothache is passed on to a frog by spitting in its mouth. even trees are considered able to relieve patients of ague. mr. tylor says: “in thuringia it is considered that a string of rowan berries, a rag, or any small article touched by a sick person, and then hung on a bush beside some forest path, imparts the malady to any person who may touch this article in passing, and frees the sick man from the disease. this gives great probability to captain burton’s suggestion, that the rags, locks of hair, and what not hung on trees near sacred places, by the superstitious, from mexico to india, and ethiopia to ireland, are deposited there as actual receptacles for transference of disease.”986
innumerable transference superstitions are met with concerning warts, and these have doubtless arisen from the very remarkable manner in which they sometimes disappear. in some cases what are taken to be warts by those not skilled in skin diseases are merely a papular eruption of a fugitive kind, which suddenly appears on the back of the hands and as suddenly vanishes. as real warts, however, often arise from constitutional causes, they will naturally disappear with improved general health; and this fact has been the fruitful parent of a host of superstitions.
mr. black gives several of these. he says:416 “lancashire wise men tell us for warts to rub them with a cinder, and this tied up in paper, and dropped where four roads meet (i.e., where the roads cross), will transfer the warts to whoever opens the parcel. another mode of transferring warts is to touch each wart with a pebble, and place the pebbles in a bag, which should be lost on the way to church; whoever finds the bag gets the warts.”987
a common warwickshire custom is to rub the warts with a black snail, stick the snail on a thorn bush, and then, say the folk, as the snail dies so will the wart disappear.
antidotes.
another old medical superstition is that every natural poison carries within itself its own antidote. galen, pliny, and dioscorides say that the poison of spanish fly exists in the body, and the head and wings contain the antidote. “a hair of the dog that bit you,” is the ancient way of stating a belief that the hairs of a rabid dog are the true specific for hydrophobia. the fat of the viper was long regarded as the remedy for its bite. in black-letter books on demonology we learn that “three scruples of the ashes of the witch, when she has been well and carefully burnt at a stake, is a sure catholicon against all the evil effects of witchcraft.”988
the doctrine of signatures.
by nothing have the annals of medicine been more disgraced than by the absurd and preposterous “doctrine of signatures.” dr. paris, in his pharmacologia, describes it as the belief that “every natural substance which possesses any medicinal virtues, indicates, by an obvious and well-marked external character, the disease for which it is a remedy or the object for which it should be employed.” thus the plant which is common in our woods, called “lungwort” (pulmonaria officinalis), was anciently considered good for chest complaints, because its leaves bear a fancied resemblance to the surface of the lungs. the root of the “mandrake,” from its supposed resemblance to the human form, was a very ancient medicine for barrenness, and was so esteemed by rachel (genesis xxx. 14).
pliny, dioscorides, and other writers attribute peculiar virtues to the mineral lapis ?tites, or eagle-stone, because the nodule within the stone rattles when it is shaken. “?tites lapis agitatus sonitum edit, velut ex altero lapide pr?gnans.” the yellow drug turmeric was held to be a cure for jaundice because it is yellow. poppies have their capsules shaped somewhat like a skull, therefore they were considered appropriate to relieve diseases of the head. euphrasia, our eye-bright, was a famous application for eye diseases, because its flowers are somewhat417 like the pupil of the eye. nettle-tea by the same rule is a country remedy for nettle-rash (urticaria). the petals of the red rose bear the “signature” of the blood, the roots of rhubarb and the flowers of saffron those of the bile.
a person who believes himself bewitched by execration and the interment of a toad, should carry about him a living toad.
southey says,989 “the signatures [were] the books out of which the ancients first learned the virtues of herbs—nature—having stamped on divers of them legible characters to discover their uses.” every healing plant, it was thought, bears in some part of its structure the type or signature of its peculiar virtue. oswald crollius is supposed to have been “the great discoverer of signatures.” some of these strange fancies are as fantastic as those of swedenborg. walnuts were considered to be the perfect signature of the head, the shell as the skull and the convolutions of the kernel as those of the two hemispheres of the brain, the outer skin would represent the scalp. so the signature doctors used the husks for scalp wounds, the inner peel for disorders of the dura mater, and the kernel was “very profitable for the brain and resists poisons.” the peony when in bud being something like a man’s head was “very available against the falling sickness.” poppy-heads for the same reason were used “with success” in general diseases of the head. lilies-of-valley were known by signature to cure apoplexy; as coles says, “for as that disease is caused by the dropping of humours into the principal ventricles of the brain, so the flowers of this lily hanging on the plants as if they were drops, are of wonderful use herein.”
capillary herbs naturally announced themselves as good for diseases of the hair. the stone crop “hath the signature of the gums,” and so was used for scurvy. the scales of pine-cones were used for the toothache, because they resemble the front teeth. prickly plants like thistles and holly were used for pleurisy and stitch in the side. saxifrage was good for the stone; kidney beans ought to have been useful for kidney diseases, but seem to have been overlooked except as articles of diet.
