“Take an egg, boil it hard, and break off the shell. Prick the egg in different places with a needle, steep it in the urine of a person afflicted with fever, and then give it to a man if the patient be a man, to a woman if a woman, and the recipient will acquire the fever, which will abandon the patient.”[85]
This remedy Thiers traces back to the Romans, quoting from Horace in support of his assertion.
The second recipe finds its parallel in the “Chinook olives,” described in the first pages of this work.
The fact that human ordure was the panacea by which all the effects of witchcraft could be undone, and all charms and incantations frustrated, can easily be shown from the citations to be found in Schurig. “Occidental sulphur,” applied externally to the pains occasioned by incantations was said to be very efficacious. Others added garlic, and twenty-four hours after exposed the mixture to the smoke of the kitchen-fire. Others again took the ordure of the bewitched person, made sausage of it, and hung it up to be smoked in the kitchen-fire.
Various instances are given of the efficacy of human ordure in undoing the work of witches; it was to be applied alone or mixed with garlic or assafœtida.
Take a liver, cut in pieces, and secretly place in the urinal of the patient; if the patient unconsciously use the chamber for defecation he will recover—(“Sagen-Märchen, Volksaberglauben,” etc., Drs. Birlinger and Buck, p. 481.)
The method of curing fevers by imbedding clippings of the finger and toe nails of the patient in wax and affixing to another person’s door-post, is mentioned by Pliny (lib. xxxviii. c. 24).
The same are given, with the others already noted, by Frommann.—(“Tractatus de Fascinatione,” p. 1003 et seq.)
Etmuller says that the oak was the tree most highly commended; to secure a good set of teeth, one of the milk teeth was buried in an oak; to restore falling hair, some of the patient’s hair; to cure gout, some of his toe-nail clippings, etc.—(Etmuller, vol. i. p. 127.)
“In Donegal, the sufferer should seek a straw with nine knees, and cut the knots that form the joints of every one of them, any superfluous knots being thrown away; then bury the knot in a midden or dung-heap; and as the joints rot, so will the warts.”—(“Folk-Medicine,” p. 57.)