“Philos.; hermet.; urine du vin, le vinaigre. Urine des jeunes colériques Le Mercure Philosophe.” Dict. National, par M. Bescherelle, aîné, Paris, 1857, sub voc. Urine (p. 1573).
We have already been informed from Marco Polo that the prisoners taken by the Tartars often poisoned themselves; “for which reason the great lords haue dogs’ dung ready, which they force them to swallow, and that forceth them to vomit the poyson” (in Purchas, vol. i. p. 92); and we have also learned, from many sources,—Etmuller, Schurig, Levinus Lemnius, Flemming, Paullini, Beckherius, Lentilius,—of the antidotal powers of the excreta. The existence of the very same belief was detected among the natives of America.
Padre Inamma, whose interesting researches upon rattlesnake bites and their remedies (made in Lower California, some time before the expulsion of the Jesuits, in 1767) are published in Clavigero,[74] says that the most usual and most efficacious antidote was human ordure, fresh and dissolved in water, drunk by the person bitten.
Along the Isthmus of Darien the belief was prevalent among the aborigines that the most efficacious remedy for poisoned arrows was that which required the wounded man to swallow pills of his own excrement.[75]
So in Peru, “when sucking infants were taken ill, especially if their ailment was of a feverish nature, they washed them in urine in the mornings, and when they could get some of the urine of the child, they gave it a drink.”[76]
OCCULT INFLUENCES ASCRIBED TO ORDURE AND URINE.
In Canada, human urine was drunk as a medicine. Father Sagard witnessed a dance of the Hurons in which the young men, women, and girls danced naked around a sick woman, into whose mouth one of the young men urinated, she swallowing the disgusting draught in the hope of being cured.[77]
Analogous medicaments may be hinted at in Smith’s account of the Araucanians of Chili: “Their remedies are principally if not entirely, vegetable matter, though they administer many disgusting compounds of animal matter, which they pretend are endowed with miraculous powers.”—(Smith, “Araucanians,” New York, 1855, p. 234.)
Brand enumerates obsolete recipes, one of which (disease not mentioned) directed the patient to take “five spoonfuls of knave child urine of an innocent.”—(Brand, “Pop. Ant.,” London, 1849, vol. iii. p. 282.)
The Crees apply the dung of animals lately killed to sprains.—(See “Mackenzie’s Voyages,” etc., to the Arctic Circle, London, 1800, introd. p. 106.)