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: “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 Ætites, or eagle-stone, because the nodule within the stone rattles when it is shaken. “Ætites lapis agitatus sonitum edit, velut ex altero lapide prægnans.” 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 somewhat 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.