Urinate into your shoe to keep it from squeaking, on Deer Isle.
Sheep-dung tea, a cure for measles, is extensively used on Deer Isle.
Boys urinate on their legs to prevent cramp. This practice was common in eastern Maine twenty to thirty years ago.
Water standing in the depressions of cow-dung was formerly recommended as a certain cure for pulmonary consumption, in New York.
Oil tried from the penis of the hog and applied to the loins of a child suffering from weakness of kidneys or bladder cured such diseases, in northern parts of the United States and in parts of Nova Scotia.
One’s own urine was administered for gravel in Staffordshire, England, within the past ten years.
A woman in England was given her own urine to drink, after a severe illness, to prevent “fits,” in the present generation. A poultice of fresh, warm cow-dung cured a man of rheumatism in New York. Measles were cured by giving the patient a decoction of lamb’s excrements (locally called “nanny-beads”), in Brunswick, N. Y., about 1825. A newly born child was given a spoonful of woman’s urine as a laxative, in 1814, in St. Albans, Vt. The white, limy part of hen-manure was used for canker-sores in mouth, in Abingdon, Ill. Cow-manure was used for swelled breasts in County Cork, Ireland. Sheep-manure tea was used for measles in County Cork, Ireland, and by the negroes of Chestertown, Md. Sheep-dung tea for measles all over New England, Ohio, and Cape Breton. Cow-dung, as fresh as possible, plastered on inflamed breasts, commonly known as “bealed” breasts, within the last twenty-five years, on Cape Breton.
Similar excrementitious remedies are in use among the Pennsylvania Germans. Cow-dung poultices are applied in the treatment of diphtheria, or as lenitives in cases of sore or gathered breasts. “Tea made of sheep-cherries (Gen. et spec.?) is given for measles.”—(“Folk-Medicine of the Pennsylvania Germans,” in “Trans. Amer. Phil. Soc.,” 1889.)
For reasons not ascertained, the use of these revolting medicaments has nearly always been veiled under the language of euphemism. Sheep-dung is rarely called by its own name, but always, as has been shown in the preceding remarks, “sheep-nanny tea,” etc. In the same manner, the use of human excreta was veiled under the high-sounding designations of “zibethum,” “oriental sulphur,” etc.
This use of sheep-dung in the treatment of measles must be very ancient and wide-spread. Surgeon Washington Matthews notes its existence among the Navajoes, who learned it from the Spaniards.