Charm-remedies—For Ague—Bleeding of the Nose—Burns—Cramp—Epilepsy—Fits—Gout—Headache, &c.

At the present day, in spite of the "march of intellect," there is still a widespread belief in the prevention and cure of the common ailments of life by certain remedies, which take the form of charms and amulets, or are preserved in those countless quaint recipes which, from time immemorial, have been handed down from parent to child. Indeed, thousands of our population place far greater faith in their domestic treatment of disease than in the skill of medical science, one of the chief requirements being that the patient should submit to the treatment recommended for his recovery with a full and earnest belief that a cure will be effected. Hence, however eccentric the remedy for some complaint may be, we occasionally find not only the ignorant but even educated classes scrupulously obeying the directions enjoined on them, although these are often by no means easy of accomplishment. Therefore, as most of the ordinary ailments of every-day life have what are popularly termed in folk-medicine their "charm-remedies," we shall give a brief account of some of[149] these remedies in the present chapter, arranging the diseases they are supposed to cure in alphabetical order.

Ague.—No complaint, perhaps, has offered more opportunities for the employment of charms than this one, owing in a great measure to an old superstition that it is not amenable to medical treatment. Thus, innumerable remedies have been suggested for its cure, many of which embody the strangest superstitious fancies. According to a popular notion, fright is a good cure, and by way of illustration we may quote the case of a gentleman, afflicted by this disease in an aggravated form, who entertained a great fear of rats. On one occasion he was accidentally confined in a room with one of these unwelcome visitors, and the intruder jumped upon him. The intensity of his alarm is said to have driven out the ague, and to have completely cured him. An amusing anecdote is also told of a poor woman who had suffered from this unenviable complaint for a long time. Her husband having heard of persons being cured by fright, one day came to her with a very long face, and informed her that her favourite pig was dead. Her first impulse was to rush to the scene of the catastrophe, where she found to her great relief that piggy was alive and well. The fright, however, had done its work, and from that day forth she never had a touch of ague, although she resided in the same locality. A Sussex remedy prescribes "seven sage leaves to be eaten by the patient fasting seven mornings running;"[150] and in Suffolk the patient is advised to take a handful of salt, and to bury it in the ground, the idea being that as the salt dissolves so he will lose his ague. A Devonshire piece of folk-lore tells us that a person suffering from ague may easily give it to his neighbour by burying under his threshold a bag containing the parings of a dead man\'s nails, and some of the hairs of his head. Some people wear a leaf of tansy in their shoes, and others consider pills made of a spider\'s web equally efficacious, one pill being taken before breakfast for three successive mornings.

Bleeding of the Nose.—A key, on account of the coldness of the metal of which it is composed, is often placed on the person\'s back; and hence the term "key-cold" has become proverbial, an allusion to which we find in King Richard III. (Act i., sc. 2), where Lady Anne, speaking of the corpse of King Henry VI., exclaims:—

"Poor key-cold figure of a holy king."

A Norfolk remedy consists in wearing a skein of scarlet silk round the neck, tied with nine knots in the front. If the patient is a male, the silk should be put on and the knots tied by a female, and vice versa. In some places a toad is killed by transfixing it with some sharp-pointed instrument, after which it is enclosed in a little bag and suspended round the neck.

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Burn or Scald.—According to a deep-rooted notion among our rural population, the most efficacious cure for a scald or burn is to be found in certain word-charms, mostly of a religious character. One example runs as follows:—
"There came two angels from the north, One was Fire, and one was Frost. Out Fire: in Frost, In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost."

Many of our peasantry, instead of consulting a doctor in the case of a severe burn, often resort to some old woman supposed to possess the gift of healing. A person of this description formerly resided in a village in Suffolk. When consulted she prepared a kind of ointment, which she placed on the part affected, and after making the sign of the cross, repeated the following formula three times:—
"There were two angels came from the north, One brought fire, the other brought frost; Come out fire, go in frost, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost."

This, as the reader will see, is in substance the same as the one quoted above, and is a fair sample of those used in other localities.

Cramp.—Of the many charms resorted to for the cure of this painful disorder, a common one consists in wearing about the person the patella or knee-cap of a sheep or lamb, which is known in some places as the "cramp-bone." This is worn as near the skin[152] as possible, and at night is laid under the pillow. In many counties finger-rings made from the screws or handles of coffins are still considered excellent preservatives, and in Lancashire it is prevented by either placing the shoes at bed-time with the toes just peeping from beneath the coverlet, or by carrying brimstone about with one during the day. Some, again, wear a tortoise-shell ring, while others have equal faith in tying the garter round the left leg below the knee. In days gone by a celebrated cure for this complaint was the "cramp-ring," allusions to which we find in many of our old authors. Its supposed virtue was conferred by solemn consecration on Good Friday.

Epilepsy.—The remedies for this terrible disorder are extremely curious, and in most cases vary in different localities. One, however, very popular charm is a ring made from a piece of silver money collected at the offertory. A correspondent of Chambers\'s "Book of Days" tells us that when he was a boy a person "came to his father (a clergyman) and asked for a \'sacramental shilling,\' i.e., one out of the alms collected at the Holy Communion, to be made into a ring and worn as a cure for epilepsy." In the North of England "a sacramental piece," as it is usually called, is the sovereign remedy for this complaint. Thirty pence are to be begged of thirty poor widows. They are then to be carried to the church minister, for which he is to give the applicant a half-crown piece from the communion alms. After[153] being "walked with nine times up and down the church aisle," the piece is then to have a hole drilled in it, and to be hung round the neck by a ribbon. It has been suggested that these widows\' pence may have some reference to the widow\'s mite which was so estimable in the eyes of Christ. According to one notion, persons afflicted with epileptic fits are supposed to be bewitched, and the following extraordinary remedy is sometimes resorted to for their cure. A quart bottle is filled with pins, and placed in front of the fire until the pins are red-hot. As soon as this takes place it is supposed they will prick the heart of the witch, who to avoid the pain caused by the red-hot pins will release her victim from the suffering she has imposed upon him. This mode of disenchantment seems to have been of common occurrence; and sometimes, when old houses are under repair, bottles full of pins are found secreted in out-of-the-way places. Another remedy is for the patient to creep, head foremost, down three pair of stairs, three times a day, for three successive days. Sir Thomas Brown, too, discourses of the virtues of mistletoe in this complaint; and Sir John Colbach, writing in the year 1720, strongly recommends it as a medicine, adding that this beautiful plant must have been designed by the Almighty "for further and more noble purposes than barely to feed thrushes, or to be hung up superstitiously in houses to drive away evil spirits."

Erysipelas.—This distemper has been popularly called "St. Anthony\'s Fire," from the legend that[154] it was miraculously checked by that saint when raging in many parts of Europe in the eleventh century. An amulet formerly worn to ward it off was made of the elder on which the sun had never shone. "If," says an old writer, "the piece between the two knots be hung about the patient\'s neck, it is much commended. Some cut it in little pieces, and sew it in a knot in a piece of a man\'s shirt." A remedy in use among the lower orders, and extending as far as the Highlands, is to cut off one half of the ear of a cat, and to let the blood drop on the part affected—a practice which is evidently a survival of the primitive notion that a living sacrifice appeased the wrath of God.

Fits.—Numerous indeed have been the charms invented for those suffering from this malady, and in many cases they are "marvellously mystical withal." Thus that little animal the mole has been in request, as the following mystic prescription will show. A gentleman residing in 1865, on the border ground of Norfolk and Suffolk, was one day asked by a neighbour to catch a live mole, as "her darter\'s little gal was subject to fits, and she had been told that if she got a live mole, cut the tip of his nose off, and let nine drops bleed on to a lump of sugar, and gave that to the child, \'twas a sartin cure." Here again we have the same notion of a sacrifice, one which, it may be noticed, underlies many of the charms of this kind. A Devonshire remedy is to go into a church at midnight and to walk three times round the Communion[155] table, while many single women wear a silver ring on the wedding-ring finger, made out of sixpences which have been begged from six young bachelors.

Gout.—The periodical attacks of this disease have from the earliest times been subjected to the influence of charms, blackberries being considered by the Greeks a good specific. Culpeper has bequeathed to us a curious remedy. He says, "Take an owl, pull off her feathers, and pull out her guts; salt her well for a week, then put her into a pot, and stop it close, and put her into an oven, that so she may be brought into a mummy, which, being beat into powder and mixed with boar\'s grease, is an excellent remedy for gout, anointing the grieved place by the fire." The germander speedwell has been esteemed highly efficacious, and the Emperor Charles V. is reported to have derived benefit from it.

Headache.—Cures to alleviate this tiresome pain are numberless. Mrs. Latham mentions what is considered by the Sussex peasantry a sure way of avoiding it in the spring, a piece of superstition we have already noticed: "No hair, either cut or combed from the head, must be thrown carelessly away, lest some bird should find it and carry it off, in which case the person\'s head would ache during all the time that the bird was busy working the spoil into its nest. \'I knew how it would be,\' exclaimed a servant, \'when I saw that bird fly away with a bit of my hair that blew out of the window this[156] morning when I was dressing; I knew I should have a clapping headache, and so I have.\'" In some counties the common corn-poppy is called "headache," from the cephalalgic tendency of the scent.

Hydrophobia.—From the most remote period no disease, perhaps, has possessed such a curious history, or been invested with so many superstitions as hydrophobia, and the countless remedies suggested for its cure form an important chapter in folk-medicine. In tracing back its history, we find that it was not only regarded by our ancestors with the same horror as now-a-days, but that every conceivable device was resorted to for removing its fatal effects. Thus, Pliny relates the case of a Roman soldier who was cured by the dog-rose, a remedy said to have been revealed to the man\'s mother in a dream. Among sundry other remedies he enumerates the hair of a man\'s head, goose-grease, fuller\'s earth, colewort, fish-brine, &c., as applications to the wounds. The favourite cure of Dioscorides was hellebore, and Galen\'s principal one was the river-crab. Sucking the wound seems also to have been considered efficacious. Passing on to modern times, the extraordinary remedies still employed are a convincing proof of the extent to which superstition occasionally reaches. The list, indeed, is not an inviting one, consisting amongst other things of the liver of a male goat, the tail of a shrew-mouse, the brain and comb of a cock, the worm under the tongue of a mad dog, horse-dung, pounded ants, and cuckoo soup. It may seem, too, incredible to us that[157] less than a century ago the suffocation of the wretched victim was not unfrequently resorted to, and instances of this barbarous practice may be found in the periodical literature of bygone years. Thus, in The Dublin Chronicle (28th October, 1798), the following circumstances are recorded:—"A fine boy, aged fourteen, was bitten by a lady\'s lap-dog near Dublin. In about two hours the youth was seized with convulsive fits, and shortly after with hydrophobia; and, notwithstanding every assistance, his friends were obliged to smother him between two feather beds." In the year 1712, four persons were tried at York Assizes for smothering a boy, who had been bitten by a mad dog, on a similar plea as that uttered by Othello:—
"I that am cruel am yet merciful: I would not have thee linger in thy pain."

As recently as the year 1867 this mode of death was put into execution in the town of Greenfield, Michigan. A little girl having been seized with hydrophobia, a consultation was held by the physicians, and as soon as it had been decided by them that she could not recover, her parents put an end to her sufferings by smothering her to death. The folk-lore of this disease is most extensive, and as our space is limited we cannot do better than recommend our readers to consult Mr. Dolan\'s capital volume on "Rabies, or Hydrophobia," which contains an excellent description of the antiquity and history of this cruel complaint, and of superstitions which surround it.

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Hysteria.—This disorder, which assumes so many deceptive forms, was formerly known as "the mother," or "hysterica passio," an allusion to which occurs in King Lear (Act ii., sc. 4), where Shakespeare represents the king as saying,
"O, how this mother swells up toward my heart! Hysterica passio! down, thou climbing sorrow, Thy element\'s below!"

Some of the charms used for its cure are much the same as those employed in cases of epilepsy, a favourite one being the wearing of a ring made of a certain number of silver pieces obtained from persons of the opposite sex.

Jaundice.—Many of the remedies recommended for this complaint are not of a very agreeable kind, as, for instance, the following one mentioned by a correspondent of Notes and Queries, first, as having been resorted to in a Dorsetshire parish, where the patient was ordered to eat nine lice on a piece o............