"Pennsylvania Dutch," and other essays

by Phebe Earle Gibbons

Reiter sie sin schnell geridde!

Laüfer nahme g’schwinde Schridde!”

“About the sand-pit school-house, at the cross-roads, things were said that I do not like to tell. It was told that there were spooks at the sand-pit, and ‘In what shape?’ was asked. People riding by rode rapidly, and those on foot hurried swiftly by.” There are still standing near the Conestoga, close to Lancaster, the remains of a building long and extensively known as “the spook house.” It probably became unpopular from a suicide in it, or from having been built in a field where strangers were buried.

A Lutheran clergyman said lately, “I do not believe in spooks myself, but plenty of people do; and sad enough it is that there should be such superstition.”

MEDICAL SUPERSTITIONS.

The peculiarities of a people are always best observed by those who do not live among them, or rather by those who visit them occasionally. Most of my notes on this subject are taken from the conversation of physicians born in other localities than those in which they practise. One in my own county mentions the “apnehme,” or wasting away of children. He says that popular remedies are measuring the child and greasing it by certain old women. Another says that the “Pennsylvania Dutch” also measure for wild-fire or erysipelas, generally using a red silk string, and measuring about sundown. They blow across the affected part to blow the fire outside of the string, at the same time they “say words” or powwow. This physician says that the greasing above mentioned is for liver-grown children, and not for “abnehme” (as it is spelled). One class of powwowers do not interfere, he says, with regular practitioners; but one old woman in this county (who builds a fire in the brick oven, and says words over the coals) has been known to hide the prescriptions of regular physicians. He adds: “If a person is burned, recourse is sometimes had to a professional blower, who blows across the surface, saying words in the interval. Along the Pennsylvania Canal, on the Susquehanna, where ague prevails, the patient who has a chill is tied to a tree by a long string, and he runs around the tree until the string is exhausted, and then on to some distance. This is tying the chill to a tree. A ‘Pennsylvania Dutch’ remedy for whooping-cough, and one by which they bother the millers a good deal, is to put the child into a hopper with grain, and let the child remain until the grain is all ground out. Blood-stopping is very common in Pennsylvania. I saw a man with an artery cut, in whose case a blood-stopper was called in. The man pressed his hand on the bleeding part and repeated something, raising his eyes to heaven; but the artery was too powerful for him.”

On the west side of the Susquehanna the only county that can distinctively be called Pennsylvania German is York. A physician in the borough says that town and county are full of superstitions. He says, “In case of hemorrhage from the nose, from a wound or from other cause, a common cure is to wrap a red woollen string round each finger; another is to lay an axe under the bed, edge upward; and you can’t talk them out of it. I used to get angry when I first came here, but I found that it was of no use. These are not occasional things only, but I have seen them over and over again. Then there are prayers for stopping blood, always in ‘Dutch.’ They can’t be sick in English, and the first question to me as a physician has been ‘Kann er Deutsch?’ (Do you speak German?) One of the prayers for stopping blood is, I understand, for human beings, and another for animals; and I think that the names of the persons of the Trinity are introduced. I have often asked, but they are not allowed to tell. Soon after I came here, I ordered some boneset tea for a patient, and the mother asked in ‘Dutch’ whether the leaves should be pulled upwards or downwards. ‘Will it make any difference?’ I asked. ‘Oh, yes; if you pull them upwards, it will work upwards; and if you pull them downwards, it will work downwards.’ [A valuable hint for a physician if the same plant can be used both as an emetic and a purgative.] Of the blood of a black fowl,—no other color will do,—three drops are given internally. I think this is for convulsions; but I hear so many of these things, and have heard them so many years, that they make no impression on my mind. These are pure ‘Pennsylvania Dutch’ peculiarities; I have found none or few of them among foreign Germans.”

I asked whether these ideas still continue or whether they are wearing out. “No,” he said, “they don’t wear out. I meet them every day. They still speak of horses and animals being bewitched (verhext). I have a story from good authority of a horse that was said to be verhext, and that turned out to have a nail in his hoof. That is a fact. What are you going to do about it?”

But to come to another county, Berks. I hear that in Reading there is a woman called the Wurst-frau, because her mother sold sausages and “puddings.” This woman has a large office practice in salves and powwowing. In an adjoining county, Lehigh, I remember a few years ago to have seen the names of two persons put down in the directory as powwowers; the word being spelled as pronounced in “Dutch.”