Grose says, “To cure warts, steal a piece of beef from a butcher’s shop and rub your warts with it; then throw it down the necessary-house, or bury it; and as the beef rots, your warts will decay.”—(Brand, “Pop. Ant.” vol. iii. p. 276, art. “Physical Charms.”)
The American cures for warts in which the sufferer is enjoined to steal a piece of meat, etc., are a perfect “survival” from the above, while the “cure” given by Mark Twain, in his story of “Huckleberry Finn”—
“Barley-corn, barley-corn, Indian meal shorts,
Spunk water, spunk water, swallow these warts,”
may be classed as a “distorted survival.”
“A piece of meat is cut from one of the arms of the menaced man (i. e. menaced with death), and a lock of hair from the opposite side of his head, and cast into the fire; and he is rubbed with artemisia, dipped in water, as this plant is the food of the ghosts. These rites, omitting the cutting of the flesh and hair, must be performed on four successive nights.”—(“Death and Funeral Customs among the Omahas,” Francis La Flesche, in “Jour. of Amer. Folk-Lore,” Jan.-March, 1889, p. 4.)
“The Orkney islanders will wash a sick person and then throw the water down a gateway in the belief that the sickness will leave the patient and be transferred to the first person who passes through the gate.”—(“The Golden Bough,” Frazer, vol. ii. p. 153.)
These cures by “transplantation” are still to be found in full vigor among the descendants of the immigrants from Westphalia and the Palatinate who made their homes in the State of Pennsylvania.
For the cure of jaundice: “Hollow out a carrot, fill it with the patient’s urine, and hang it, by means of a string, in the fireplace. As the urine is evaporated, and the carrot becomes shrivelled, the disease will leave the patient. In this there is an evident belief in the connection between the properties and color of the carrot and the yellow skin of the patient having jaundice. To this class may belong the belief respecting the use of a band of red flannel for diphtheria, and yellow or amber beads for purulent discharges from the ears.”—(“Folk-Med. of the Penn’a Germans,” Hoffman, Amer. Phil. Society, 1889.)
Reference should be had to Black’s notes upon a similar custom in Staffordshire, where, instead of a carrot, a bladder is filled.—(“Folk-Medicine,” p. 56.)