“Slight wounds are cured” by the application of dirt to the part affected.—(“Nat. trib. of S. Australia,” p. 284, received through the kindness of the Roy. Soc. Sydney, N. S. Wales, T. B. Kyngdon, Secretary.)
Mr. Chrisfield, of the Library of Congress, Washington, D. C., states that urine was a remedy for earache among people on eastern shore of Maryland and Virginia; while for the cure of jaundice, in New England, “the spider, and even a more disagreeable remedy, is administered in a spoonful of molasses.”—(“Folk-Medicine,” Black, London, 1883, p. 61, quoting Napier, “Folk-Lore,” p. 95, and “Folk-Lore Record,” vol. i. p. 45.)
“I am impressed to tell you of a custom that prevailed to some extent among the people of this State (Iowa); this was the use of sheep-dung for measles. The dung was made into what the old women denominated ‘tea,’ and was familiarly known as ‘sheep-nanny tea.’ It was believed to be singularly efficacious in bringing out the eruption. The mixture was sweetened with sugar, and thus disguised was given to children. This practice was kept up among certain classes until about twenty years ago; I have not heard of it, at least in recent years. I can trace the custom through the origin of the families in which it was practised here to Indiana and North Carolina.”—(Personal letter from Prof. S. B. Evans, Ottumwa, Iowa, to Captain Bourke, April 16, 1888.)
“I was told by an old person, now dead, that some fifty years since the urine of a cow was given internally as a remedy for chlorosis, in the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk.”—(Personal letter from Prof. Frank Rede Fowke to Captain Bourke, dated London, England, June 18, 1888.)
“In the country where I was born I have seen several times, when a cow or an ox had one of its horns knocked away by a shock or any other cause, people pissing into the horn before putting it again over its root. This was supposed necessary to cause the horn to stick firmly against the root.”—(Personal letter from Captain Henri Jouan, French Navy, Cherbourg, July 29, 1888.)
“The presence of ammonia in the secretions (whose power of neutralizing acids may have been accidentally discovered) may have had something to do with the repute of the excretions of the kidneys. I remember to have been told as a little boy of the virtues of urine as a relief to chapped hands, also as a counter-irritant for inflamed eyes. In the former case the ammonia would soften as an alkali; in the latter, the salts present would act to reduce congestion, like common salt, by endosmosis.”—(Personal letter from Prof. E. N. Horsford, Harvard University, to Captain Bourke, April 19, 1888.)
“I have been recently informed, by a man who is acquainted with the peculiarities of Parisian life, that there are men who are in the habit of swallowing the scum which they obtain from the street urinals, and that they are known as ‘Les mangeurs du blanc.’” (Prof. Frank Rede Fowke.) According to Parent du Chatelet, a “mangeur du blanc” meant in Paris, until 1810, “a man who lived off the earnings of a strumpet.” The name has since been changed to “paillasson.” (See “La Prostitution,” Paris, 1857, vol. i. p. 138.)
“When I was a boy we had in my father’s house a gang of cats, and I remember that frequently the people of Cherbourg came and asked permission to search in our garrets for cat’s dung, which, they said, mixed and infused in white wine, produced a very efficient drink against periodical fits of fever.”—(Captain Henri Jouan, French Navy.)
“Lye-tea, made of human urine and lime-water, was used for colds by the ‘old people’ in the rural parts of Central New York.”—(Conversation with Colonel Pierce, Dr. Pangborn, and Lieutenant W. G. Elliott, U. S. Army, at San Carlos Agency, Arizona.)
The savages of Australia apply to wounds the resin of the eucalyptus, and also the bark of the same tree, previously steeped in human urine. (Personal letter from John Mathew, Esq., M. A., to Captain Bourke, dated “The Manse,” Coburg, Victoria, November, 1889.) The same thing is referred to in “The Australian Race,” E. M. Curr, Melbourne, 1886, vol. i. p. 256. In regard to the uses of the crust of latrines, in connection with “mangeurs du blanc,” see other pages of this volume.