Marcellus mentions a number of prescriptions which cannot be cases of transplantation, but rather intended to unite a diseased body with a sound one for the benefit of the former. Take his remedy for a gathering in the ear by injecting the warm urine of a boy under the age of puberty. Or where incontinence of urine is to be cured by making water in a dog’s sleeping-place, saying the while: “Let me not make water in my own bed, like a dog.” Or the recommendation to apply the cut hairs of a boy under puberty to the suffering foot of a gouty patient. A prescription extolled as et praesens et maximum for consumptives, even when apparently beyond hope, consists in administering the saliva or foam of a horse in warm water for three days: the horse will die, and the sick man recover.[154.3] Even here, in spite of the horse’s death, we have no warrant for supposing that the disease is transferred to him. The operation upon him is clearly to be attributed to the magical principle so fully discussed in this and the previous chapter. The process is the converse of transplantation. Nothing that has touched the patient is brought back to the unfortunate horse. His death is caused by union through his own saliva with a sick body which absorbs his qualities of health and strength.
An old French remedy for a cough, and probably also for toothache, is traceable back to Marcellus. It was to spit in a frog’s mouth—a method of cure still in vogue in Shropshire and perhaps elsewhere in England.[155.1] No doubt it was a traditional remedy long before the Emperor’s physician gravely recorded it, and added that the patient must stand shod upon the bare earth under the bare heaven, on a Tuesday or Thursday at waning moon, and repeat seven times: Argidam, margidam, sturgidam. Moreover the patient is solemnly to ask the frog to take the toothache with her; “and then shalt thou let her go alive; and this shalt thou do on a fortunate day and at a fortunate hour.” O learned physician! This does appear, at least as Marcellus understood it, a case of transplantation; and it is no part of my business to combat every instance. I only desire to point out that Transplantation is a theory inadequate to account for many remedies which it has been dragged in to explain; and to express the doubt whether it be not after all a comparatively recent development in folk-medicine.
Saliva prescriptions, numerous as they are, need not detain us longer. Nor will I pause upon those of the fouler excrements. They are made, as we might expect, to subserve the purposes of healing, as well as those of witchcraft, and in the same general manner. I shall, therefore, only add a few references at the foot of the page for the use of students.[156.1]
For various diseases the patient’s bath-water and fomentations, wherein are often mingled simples of different sorts, are in Germany, Hungary and Transylvania poured out upon a tree, into flowing water, into the churchyard, or upon dead human bones.[156.2] The Magyars, as a depilatory for children born with much hair on their bodies, put ashes on the four corners of the bath-tub, and throw into the water three potatoes, which they fling, after the bath, behind the oven. As the potatoes dry up, the hair is expected to disappear.[156.3]
Not only the bath-water and fomentations but also cloths and articles of clothing which have been in contact with the patient, and especially with the diseased member, are subject to treatment for the purpose of healing, of causing, or of preventing disease. At Rauen, near Fürstenwald, in Northern Germany, the remedy for a violent headache is to bind a cloth round the head at night, and take it on the following morning to a wise man, who will charm not the head, but the cloth.[157.1] Among the Transylvanian Gipsies a certain kind of sore is cured by covering it with a red rag and pegging the rag by night in a hole in a tree. The words used on the occasion are: “Stay thou here, until the rag become a beast, the beast a tree, the tree a man, to strike thee dead!” So far as they have a meaning they point to transplantation, though not conclusively. Dr. von Wlislocki, who reports them, suggests they contain a reminiscence of a Gipsy Creation-myth. If so, they are probably archaic; but this is doubtful.[157.2] An old physician relates of a patient who had a violent pain in the arm that it was healed by a plaster of red coral beaten up with oak-leaves, which was kept on the part until suppuration and then in the morning put into an auger-hole in the root of an oak, looking towards the east, and the hole stopped with a peg of the same tree. The pain ceased, but returned more sharply than before when the peg was taken out.[157.3] In Middle Silesia plasters and bandages from wounds must only be thrown into flowing water—certainly never into the fire, lest the hurt be made incurable.[157.4] The Masurs in East Prussia, after suffering from an attack of fever, and not until it is over, take off the patient’s shirt and carry it, after sunset or before sunrise, if possible on a Thursday, to a cross-road and suspend it on the sign-post.[158.1] It is a French prescription for hastening a slow delivery to bind the woman’s girdle about the church-bell and sound the bell thrice.[158.2] In 1630 the wife of Francesco Noverta of Pordenone was brought before the Inquisition in Italy for taking her husband’s shirt to a wise man to be “signed,” in order to cure him of some disease. The man signed it with a crown, repeating sacred words and invoking the saints. He did more. He gave her an oil to anoint the patient’s back and stomach, a piece of bread for him to eat, and certain herbs to be put under his bolster, together with a powder. But when she got home, so she told the holy inquisitors, she threw all these things on the fire, and kept only the shirt: she had more confidence in the charm than the simples.[158.3] These cases, in which there is no transplantation, may perhaps be allowed to interpret the ambiguity of some of the following. The Saxons of the Seven Cities cure the swelling of the glands of the neck by stealing a piece of bacon over night and binding it round the throat with a rag, and the next morning hanging the bandage on a tree, or throwing it in the fire. In the former case, the spell to be uttered, while removing the bandage, is: “Tree, thou hast many knots; take away my knots also.” In the latter, it is: “The knotman has seven sons; the knotwife has seven daughters; they married, lived together and did not agree; they parted and disappeared like the bacon in the fire. So, in God’s name, let the knots disappear in N. N.’s neck, that he may enjoy pure the Holy Supper of the Body and Blood of Our Lord. Amen.”[159.1] Galician Jews cure infantine convulsions by throwing articles of the child’s clothing into a stream where it divides into two branches, and crying thrice: “Here hast thou thine; give me mine.” This is, of course, a prayer for the child’s health. They are also careful not to hang swaddling clothes out of doors to dry, nor to drop them on the ground, else the child whose they are will lose its rest.[159.2] The garb of Italian babies must likewise be tenderly treated in washing, else the infants will be afflicted with various pains. Abruzzian babe-clothes must not be washed in the water whence horses have drunk, lest the babe’s tender skin be heated. A Tuscan baby is cured of a certain disorder by putting its clothes in boiling water with a nail, some laurel and garden-flowers, like rose or jasmine, and afterwards rinsing them in flowing water.[159.3] Against a menstruation too copious a Galician Jewess washes her own shift together with her husband’s night-dress.[159.4] The intention here seems to be not to attempt the absurdity of transferring the menstruation to the husband, but by uniting the patient to a healthy man through the contact of their clothing, to obtain for her that quality of his whereof she stands especially in need. Conversely, one of the remedies of Italian women for suppressed menstruation is to send the sufferer’s shift to the wash with the linen of a woman who has just been delivered; and they firmly believe that a washerwoman may cause them painful menstruation by beating their linen too hard, or by using burning coals with the ashes in making the lye.[160.1] Nor must we forget here the Bosnian rite for procuring conception, referred to in a previous chapter. The barren woman’s wedding-garment is not worn by the quick woman wound about her body for the purpose of transferring the barrenness to herself. On the contrary, she wears it that her prolific influence may thus be communicated to her friend; and she continues to wear it until that effect is produced.
Other things that have been brought into contact with the body may also be efficaciously treated. In Donegal the piece of turf whereon a sick cow first treads on getting up is cut out and hung against the wall; and the cow is expected to recover.[160.2] Formerly in France a limping cow was healed by cutting out the turf whereon the lame foot had trodden and putting it to dry on a hedge. To cure quartan fever a certain herb was plucked secretly and in silence, and thrown to the winds.[160.3] In the seventeenth century a prescription for epilepsy was three nails made on Midsummer Eve driven over their heads into the place where the patient had fallen, his name being uttered the while.[160.4] For spasms at the heart it is recommended in Transylvania to lie on the back on the turf. The length and breadth of the patient’s body is then marked, and the turf to the thickness of a finger cut out, if possible in one piece, and thrown into a brook with the words: “Spring-wife, spring-wife, take the water from my heart; I give thee what lay under my heart.”[160.5] In Thuringia, to heal sores on the body three crosses are made with a bit of comfrey on the sores before sunrise, and the comfrey is then buried in a place where it will quickly rot, and whither the patient is not likely soon to come.[161.1] A like remedy is given in the Grihya-sutra of Âpastamba. If a wife be affected with consumption, or be otherwise sick, one who has to observe chastity is to rub her limbs with young lotus-leaves, still unrolled, and with lotus-roots and certain formulæ; the leaves and roots are afterwards thrown away towards the west.[161.2] For whooping-cough, a mother in Norfolk looks for a dark spider in the house, and having found it holds it over the child’s head, repeating thrice:
“Spider, as you waste away,
Whooping-cough no longer stay.”
She then hangs the spider in a bag over the mantelpiece—formerly no doubt it was hung in the chimney—and when it dries up the cough will be gone.[161.3] A feverish patient, among the Jews of Galicia, wraps a hair taken from his body about a louse, and throws the creature away. While, against epilepsy, a black hen is rent in pieces over the sick man; or a cock is slaughtered and buried, its head being first cut off on the threshold of a barn: with the decay of its flesh the epileptic recovers health.[161.4] The old French superstitions recorded by Thiers prescribe for various diseases a branch of a plum-tree hung to dry in the chimney, a cabbage stolen from a neighbour’s garden and hung up to dry, nine grains of barley put into a bottle of clear water, a hard-cooked egg put into an anthill, certain drugs wrapped in a piece of new cloth and thrown into the fire. They do not in every case mention that these articles must be first applied to the patient; but it is tolerably clear that this is meant.[162.1] And it must also be inferred that the cock in the Galician prescription was formerly brought into similar contact, though perhaps in this case, as in many others throughout Europe, the touching has fallen into disuse. The black hen, it is obvious, could not be torn in pieces without its blood falling on the patient and so bringing it into union with the disease. Remedies of the kind under consideration are naturally most in vogue for external diseases, such as warts, boils and sties. But enough: examples of their application to all kinds of disease are endless.
I have mentioned some cases where corpses have played remedial parts. A few more illustrations may be added, more clearly to bring out the real meaning of the prescriptions, which are divisible into two classes—the one wherein the patient himself is brought into contact with the body, or with some article that has belonged to it, or been in contact with it; the other wherein articles belonging to the patient, or which have been part of, or in contact with, his body are deposited in the coffin, or the grave, and thus brought into permanent connection with the dead. The intention of both appears to be the same, namely, to bring the disease into union with the corpse, in order that, as the latter suffers decay and dissolution, it also may decay and perish.
In enumerating a few instances of the former class, let me first refer to the fact that touching or stroking with the hand of a corpse is a remedy known in every part of Europe for superficial growths like wens, tetters, and swollen glands. In September 1892, a fashionably dressed young woman was one day seen hovering about a physician’s residence in the north of Berlin. When he went out she met him and timidly prayed him to take her, when he had an opportunity, to a dead body. He thought she must be suffering from overstrain or mental disorder, and brusquely refused her. In nowise daunted, however, she begged him earnestly to grant her request, explaining that her object was to remove a deformity. As she said this, she laid bare a delicate white hand blemished by a bony outgrowth, known among surgeons as exostosis. The medical man became interested; and it was not long before he stood with her in the presence of a corpse. The lady grasped the cold right hand and with it repeatedly and silently stroked the ugly excrescence. Then, without speaking, she left the room in all haste; nor was the physician able to learn who she was, or what had led her to seek this means of relief.[163.1] In the good old days, when what was called Justice was chiefly exhibited in hanging men with short shrift on every convenient pretext and at every convenient place, this remedy was much easier to obtain than it is to-day. In Europe it was universal; and perhaps it was partly the facility for touching an executed criminal that led to a preference in popular pharmacopœia for such corpses. Partly also it may have arisen from another cause. The victims of violence are often regarded as endowed after death with extraordinary virtue. When that violence took the form of persecution for adherence to the Church, the Church herself encouraged and systematised the superstition to her own profit. Popular sympathy with unmerited suffering extended the Church’s doctrine to other murders, judicial murders among them. And often the Church did not hesitate to sanction the popular canonisation, and appropriate the material gains that followed. But beyond all that the Church could sanction, there remained a margin constantly supplied by the bloodthirsty tribunals, as well as by private enterprise. The former may have been more regular in their action; but one thing is certain. Their victims were more uniformly derived from the classes which were chiefly concerned in forming and preserving tradition. The feeling of oppression would be likely to generalise all executions into martyrdoms, entailing miraculous powers analogous to those recognised by the Church. This would be enough to intensify the operation of any potency believed to be the ordinary property of a corpse, and so to favour the resort to the bodies of criminals.[164.1]