Badaga nursing-women physic themselves with ashes and pieces of sweet-flag (Acorus calamus), an aromatic plant, with the idea of communicating medicinal properties to the milk. They also administer to the baby assafœtida and a certain sacred confection taken from the entrails of a bull and similar to the bezoar stones so celebrated in the middle ages.[122]
The Badaga folk do not permit a pregnant woman to enter the room where the provisions are kept and the fireplace stands; it would be feared that her condition, her supposed uncleanness, might lessen the virtues of the fire or diminish the nutritious value of the food.[123]
Pliny says, “there is no limit to the marvellous powers attributed to females.”[124] At certain times, according to him, a woman can scare away hailstorms, whirlwinds, and lightnings, by going about in scanty costume. If she walk round a field of wheat at such times, the caterpillars, worms, beetles, and other vermin will fall from the ears of corn. If she touch “young vines, they are irremediably injured, and both rue and ivy, plants possessed of highly medicinal virtues, will die instantly upon being touched by her.” Bees, he says, will forsake their hives if she touches them, linen boiling in a cauldron will turn black, and the edge of a razor will become blunted. The bitumen that is found in Judæa will yield to nothing but this, and Tacitus says the same thing. Marvellous to say, poisonous and injurious as Pliny and other writers, and even popular belief at the present day, consider the catamenial fluid to be, a host of writers on medical and magical subjects have attributed certain remedial properties to it. Pliny says it is useful, as a topical application, for gout, the bite of a mad dog (what has not been recommended for this!), for tertian or quartan fevers and for epilepsy. Reduced to ashes and mixed with soot and wax, it is a cure for ulcers upon all kinds of beasts of burden; mixed in the same way with oil of roses and applied to the forehead, it cured the migraine of Roman ladies. Applied to the doorposts, it neutralises all the spells of the magicians—a set of men which even the credulous Pliny characterizes as the most lying in existence.
Both savages and classical peoples had the same curious notions about the touch of catamenial women. There may possibly be some foundation in bacteriology to account for them.
St. Augustine says:[125] “The woman in child-bed must have three gods to look to her after her deliverance, lest Sylvanus come in the night and torment her: in signification whereof, three men must go about the house in the night, and first strike the thresholds with an hatchet, then with a pestle, and then sweep them with besoms, that by these signs of worship they may keep Sylvanus out.”
Lying-in women in Germany in the seventeenth century were simply crammed with food about every two hours, and they seem to have taken no harm from the practice.