(See previous references to the therapeutics of the native Australians in this volume.)
“Plasters of mixed grass, butter, and cow-dung were placed on the wounds” of sore-backed animals in Abyssinia.—(“A Visit to Abyssinia,” W. Winstanley, London, 1881, vol. ii. p. 3.)
Cameron employed a native medicine-man, near Lake Tanganyika, to treat one of his men who had injured his eye. “His treatment consisted of a plaster of mud and dirt, and his fee was forty strings of beads.”—(“Across Africa,” London, 1877, vol. i. p. 322. The word “dirt,” as used by Cameron in the above sentence, no doubt means ordure.)
Mr. Stewart Culin, of Philadelphia, Penn., who has been making careful investigations into the Chinese materia medica, states that “frequent directions for the use of urine” are to be seen “among the official remedies in the herbal.” Only a few pages back, reference was had to the use by the Chinese in Batavia of all kinds of excrementitious remedies.[78]
The Reverend Maurice J. Bywater writes from Nassau, Bahamas, that during the seven years he was on missionary duty in the island of Borneo, he witnessed several very curious and remarkable instances of the restorative and stimulating effects of human urine, as used by the Chinese immigrants in cases of accident.
The Coreans use the same system of medicine as the Chinese. Both employ plasters of human excrement for bites, erysipelas, inflammations, etc. They use the urine of a healthy boy as a tonic.—(Dr. H. T. Allen, Secretary of Legation, Corean Embassy, Washington, D. C., 1888.)[79]
Our knowledge of the Thibetans is still so limited that we must not attach too much importance to the little we have so far gained; there is still much to be learned concerning that singular, isolated race.
The strange veneration accorded the excrement of the Grand Lama has been fully discussed, but their sacred books do not show that the employment of stercoraceous medicaments is carried any farther.
According to the translation of the “Pratimoksha Sutra” made by Mr. W. W. Rockhill, sick Buddhist monks were ordered to employ the following remedies: “Le beurre fondu, l’huile, la mélasse, le miel, l’écume de mélasse.”—(“Asiatic Society,” Paris, 1885, p. 22.)
Dr. Francis Parkman, in his “Jesuits in North America,” Boston, 1867, introduction, p. xl., speaks of the “revolting remedies” employed by the Huron, Iroquois, and Algonquin tribes.