Transferring Diseases.
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.
Witches’ Powers.
The powers of witches were extensive but at the same time curiously restricted. When Agnes Simpson was tried in Scotland in 1590 she confessed that to compass the death of James VI she had hung up a black toad for nine days and caught the juice which dropped from it. If she could have obtained a piece of linen which the king had worn she could have killed him by applying to it some of this venom, which would have caused him such pain as if he had lain on sharp thorns or needles.
Another means they had of inflicting torture was to make an effigy in wax or clay of their victim and then to stick pins into it or beat it. This would cause the person represented the pain which it was desired to inflict.
The Universal Tendency.
It would merely try the patience of the reader to enumerate even a tithe of the absurd things which have been and are being used by people, civilised and savage, as charms, talismans, and amulets. The teraphim which Rachel stole from her father Laban, the magic knots of the Chaldeans, the gold and stone ornaments of the Egyptians, which they not only wore themselves but often attached to their mummies—a multitude of these going back as far as the flint amulets of the predynastic period, are to be seen in the British Museum—the precious stones whose virtues were discovered by Orpheus, the infinite variety of gold and silver ornaments adopted by the Romans with superstitious notions, the fish, ichthys, being the initials of the Greek words for Jesus Christ, the Lord, our Saviour, engraved on stones and worn by the early Christians, the Gnostic gems, the coral necklaces, the bezoar stones, the toad ashes, the strands of the ropes used for hanging criminals, the magnets of the middle ages and of modern times, and a thousand other things, credited with magical curative properties, might be cited. Besides these there are myriads of forms of words written or spoken, some pious, some gibberish, which have been used and recommended both with and without drugs.
Schelenz in “Geschichte der Pharmacie” (1904) quotes from Jakob Mærlant of Bruges, “the Father of Flemish science” (born about 1235) the recommendation of an “Amulettring” on the stone of which the figure of Mercury was engraved, and which would make the wearer healthy, “die mæct sinen traghere ghesont.” (See Cramp Rings, p. 305.)
How widespread has been the belief in the power of amulets and charms may be gathered from a few instances of such superstitions among famous persons. Lord Bacon was convinced that warts could be cured by rubbing lard on them and transferring the lard to a post. The warts would die when the lard dried. Robert Boyle attributed the cure of a hæmorrhage to wearing some moss from a dead man’s skull. The father of Sir Christopher Wren relates that Lord Burghley, the Lord Treasurer of England in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, kept off the gout by always wearing a blue ribbon studded with a particular kind of snail shells round his leg. Whenever he left it off the pain returned violently. Burton in the “Anatomy of Melancholy” (1621) says St. John’s Wort gathered on a Friday in the horn of Jupiter, when it comes to his effectual operation (that is about full moon in July), hung about the neck will mightily help melancholy and drive away fantastical spirits.