If any one was seized with a colic, and colic water was not handy, all that was necessary was for some one to slip out and catch either a carp or a pike, slit the fish open whilst alive, and clap it on the stomach of the sufferer—and lo! a cure. This sounds all very nice, but it has often taken me three days to catch a pike, and carp, by-the-way, are not very widely distributed; and as colic water required for the making thereof nearly every flower which blooms in our woods and gardens, and of two or three others which never do so in ’perfidious Albion’—and when actually all things had been obtained, it could not be properly prepared under nine months—possibly there may have been some other remedy I have not heard of, and which could be applied during the time the pike was being captured, otherwise the patient would often have a lengthy squirm of it.
For pains in the joints, a toad tied belly downwards over the affected part would enable the patient to walk as well as ever. Now this is something sensible; just you find a poor body suffering from pains in the joints, and then produce a toad, and you will work a miracle. Long before you can tie it belly downwards anywhere, the patient, if a female, will be beating her best running record; if a male, his joints will be right in an instant, and you will have to take the toad outside, minus dignity.
An old lady tells me she has known a drink made from the following ingredients do a power of good in case of fever:—a handful of dandelion, agrimony, verjuice, rue, powdered crab’s eyes and claws, and yarrow from off a grave. These had to be boiled for some hours, and taken when the moon was on the wane. Doubtless there was another recipe equally efficacious for those who unfortunately were struck down with fever when the moon was on the rise.
The tongue of a still-born calf, if dried and worn so that it touched the spine, would prevent fits of almost any kind.
Wart-charmers are not defunct yet. I know several who, after pronouncing an inaudible incantation, rub the wart with a special stone, and then you are assured the wart or warts will die. Frog spit rubbed on a wart is said to be a certain cure. If you rub your wart with a black snail, sticking the snail on a thorn where you will never see it again, the wart, as the snail dies, will disappear. If you yearn to afflict any one with warts, let them wash in water in which eggs have been boiled. This belief is quite common to-day. A plate of salt, upon which a dead man’s hand has rested overnight, used to be considered good for chilblains.
Master Sadler of Bedale, in the year 1773, undertook the cure of ague in quite a simple way. After the patient had answered a few searching questions touching his past private life—which information doubtless he would much rather have kept to himself—his name was chalked at the back of the hob, an incantation pronounced, and he went home whole. I am inclined to the belief that many in these days would have to take the ague back with them. The ague is bad enough, but for a fellow to systematically trot out one’s past doings would be infinitely worse. That was a hundred years ago; but only the other day I was told that if a field-mouse was skinned and made into a small pie and eaten, and the warm skin bound hair-side against the throat, and kept there for nine days, the worst whooping cough ’’at ivver was’ would be cured.
Speaking of whooping cough, I remember a lady at Guisborough, only a few years ago, taking both her boys to the gasworks for them to inhale the fumes from the gas-tank. It nearly poisoned the whole three, but the cough survived it nicely. However, that and the field-mouse were infinitely preferable to the recipe I had from an old dame, who assured me ’no cough o’ no kind whatsoever could stan’ agaan it.’ It was this: equal quantities of hare’s dung and owl’s pellets—the latter are the disgorged remains of feathers, bones, &c., which the owl objects to digest. Well, having carefully mixed these two ingredients with dill-water, clay, and the blood of a white duck, the resulting filth had to be made into pills the size of a nut, three of which had to be taken fasting on going to bed. This was to be continued until the cough was cured or the patient buried. A much simpler method is to catch a frog, open its mouth and cough into it three times, throw the poor brute over your left shoulder, and the patient will be cured at once. If not, depend upon it there is some very good reason why the charm has failed. One woman I knew, used to take her little girl and hold her over an old well when a bad fit of coughing seized the child. She declared, if at the time either a frog or a toad happened to be at the bottom of the well with its mouth open, the child would be cured instantly. I offered to catch her a frog and open its mouth for the child to cough into; this she objected to, because, as she said, the frog might spit at it and injure it for life. This belief in the poisonous and spitting power of frogs is still retained by the good people of Great Ayton, and also of many other places. I remember an old angler once saying to me, ‘Ya see, the Lord gav’ t’ fishes understan’ing; tha knaw ’at frogs is venomous, an’ tha’re a gran’ bait foor pike, bud neea pike’ll tak ho’d if ya deean’t run t’ heuk thruff baith ther lips, seea ez tha can’t spit at ’em.’ ‘But,’ said I, ‘how do the pike catch them when they are swimming in a natural state?’ ‘Easy eneeaf,’ answered he; ‘tha tak hodden ’em fra behint, an’ tha can’t spit backkards waay ower ther heeads, ya knaw.’
Still another plan may be tried to ease the little sufferers. If they be passed nine times under the belly and over the back of either a piebald pony or an ass (the latter preferred), the cough will be immediately charmed away, whilst a touch on the larynx from the hand of a seventh son of a seventh son is held to be a certain cure. And a hairy caterpillar or small wood-lizard tied round the child’s neck, having been stitched in a small bag, was, and I believe is yet, looked upon as a sovereign remedy.
Snail soup is drunk even to-day for the cure of consumption. And the skin of an eel (if skinned when alive), placed in a silken bag and worn so as to rest on the chest, is believed to cut phlegm when nothing else will.
To cure the ‘water-springs,’ an old name for acidity or heartburn, old people tell me the following is an infallible cure if taken in time—a very wise proviso—burnt oyster, cockle, and mussel shells ground to powder, equal parts, and mixed in worm-water. This latter was prepared by gathering a handful of worms from the churchyard and boiling them. The burnt shells might do good; ordinary water and chalk would have been equally efficacious, had they but known it.