An early idea was that toothache was caused by a worm and that henbane seed roasted would cure it. The following from "The School of Salerne" formulates this superstition:
"If in your teeth you hap to be tormented, By meane some little wormes therein do breed, Which pain (if heed be tane) may be prevented, Be keeping cleane your teeth, when as you feede; Burne Francomsence (a gum not evil sented), Put Henbane unto this, and Onyon seed, And with a tunnel to the tooth that's hollow, Convey the smoke thereof, and ease shall follow."
Even to-day, I suppose, druggists sell henbane seed for this purpose. The seed is used by sprinkling it on hot cinders and holding the open mouth over the rising smoke. The heat causes the seed to sprout, and thus there appears something similar to a maggot, which is ignorantly supposed by the sufferer to have dropped from the tooth.[160]
Warts.—The cures for warts are many and varied. There have been many charms devised for their removal. Grose gives directions to "Steal a piece of beef from a butcher's shop, and rub your wart with it, then throw it down the necessary house, or bury it, and as the beef rots, your warts will decay."[161] Some have great faith in having a vagrant count them, mark the number on the inside of his hat, and then when he leaves the neighborhood he takes the warts with him. Coffin water was also considered good for them.
"For warts," says Sir Thomas Browne, "we rub our hands before the moon, and commit any magulated part to the touch of the dead. Old Women were always famous for curing warts; they were so in Lucian's time."[162]
Sir Kenelm Digby, in a work already referred to, says: "One would think that it were folly that one should offer to wash his hands in a well-polished silver basin, wherein there is not a drop of water, yet this may be done by the reflection of the moonbeams only, which will afford it a competent humidity to do it; but they who have tried it, have found their hands, after they are wiped, to be much moister than usually; but this is an infallible way to take away warts from the hands, if it be often used."
Black gives us several ways of charming away warts. 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, 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." A common Warwickshire custom was to rub the warts with a black snail, stick the snail on a thorn bush, and then, say the folks, as the snail dies so will the wart disappear.[163]
Warts, on the other hand, seem in certain cases to be considered lucky. In "Syr Gyles Goosecappe, Knight," a play of 1606, Lord Momford is made to say: "The Creses here are excellent good: the proportion of the chin good; the little aptnes of it to sticke out; good. And the wart aboue it most exceeding good."
Wen.—A newspaper of 1777 reports: "After he (Doctor Dodd) had hung about ten minutes, a very decently dressed young woman went up to the gallows in order to have a wen in her face stroked by the Doctor's hand; it being a received opinion among the vulgar that it is a certain cure for such a disorder. The executioner, having untied the Doctor's hand, stroked the part affected several times therewith."
At the execution of Crowley, a murderer of Warwick, in 1845, a similar scene is described in the newspapers: "At least five thousand persons of the lowest of the low were mustered on this occasion to witness the dying moments of the unhappy culprit.... As is usual in such cases (to their shame be it spoken) a number of females were present, and scarcely had the soul of the deceased taken its farewell flight from its earthly tabernacle, than the scaffold was crowded with members of the 'gentler sex' afflicted with wens in the neck, with white swellings in the knees, &c., upon whose afflictions the cold clammy hand of the sufferer was passed to and fro for the benefit of his executioner."[164]