A dramatist of Charles the First's reign, says,
'Tis thought the hairy child that's shown about
Came by the mother's thinking on the picture
Of Saint John Baptist, in his camel's coat.
But for this and other recorded cases of the same kind the Doctor accounted more satisfactorily to himself by his own theory. For though imagination, he said, might explain these perfectly well, (which he fully admitted,) yet it could not explain the horned, nor the tubercular, nor the ruminating cases; nor the case of John Ferguisson, of the parish of Killmelfoord in Argyleshire, who lived eighteen years without taking any other sustenance than water, and must therefore either have been a leech, tortoise, or some other creature capable of being so supported. Nor could any thing so well as his hypothesis explain the cases in which various parts of the human body had been covered with incrustations, which were shed and reproduced in continual succession, a habit retained from some crustaceous stage of existence, and probably acquired in the form of a crab or lobster. Still more remarkable was the case of a German, communicated by Dr. Steyerthall to the Royal Society: this poor man cast his leg by an effort of nature, not by an immediate act of volition as he would have done in his crab or lobster state, for the power had not been retained with the habit, but after long and severe suffering; the limb however at last separated of itself, and the wound healed.
Neither, he said, could imagination explain the marvellous and yet well-attested story of the Danish woman who lay in, like Leda, of two eggs. The neighbours who were called in at the delivery, most improperly broke one and found that it contained a yolk and white, to all appearance as in that of a hen, which it also resembled in size. The other, instead of endeavouring to hatch it, they sent to Olaus Wormius, and it is still to be seen at Copenhagen.
How, he would ask, was the case of Samuel Chilton, near Bath, to be explained, who used to sleep for weeks and months at a time; but as an old habit of hibernation, acting at irregular times, because it was no longer under the direction of a sane instinct. And how that of the idiot at Ostend, who died at last in consequence of his appetite for iron, no fewer than eight and twenty pieces to the amount of nearly three pounds in weight, having been found in his stomach after death. Who but must acknowledge that he had retained this habit from an ostrich?
This poor creature was really ferrivorous. The Doctor though he sometimes pressed into his service a case to which some exceptions might have been taken, would not have classed as a quondam ostrich, the sailor who used to swallow knives for a feat of desperate bravery, and died miserably as might be expected. Nor would he have formed any such conclusion concerning the person of whom Adam Clarke has preserved the following remarkable story, in the words of Dr. Fox who kept a lunatic asylum near Bristol.
“In my visits among my patients, one morning, I went into a room where two, who were acquaintances of each other, were accustomed to live: immediately I entered, I noticed an unusual degree of dejection about one of them, and a feverish kind of excitement in the other. I enquired what was the matter? ‘Matter!’ said the excited one, ‘matter enough! he has done for himself!’—‘Why? what has he done?’—‘Oh he has only swallowed the poker!’ During this short conversation the other looked increasingly mournful; and on my enquiring what was the matter with him, he replied, ‘He has told you true enough; I have swallowed the poker, and do not know what I shall do with it!’ ‘I will tell you how it happened,’ said the first. ‘My friend and I were sitting by the fire talking on different things, when I offered to lay him a wager that he could not eat any of the poker: he said he could and would; took it up, twisted the end of it backward and forward between the bars of the grate, and at last broke off some inches of it, and instantly swallowed it; and he has looked melancholy ever since.’ I did not believe,” said Dr. Fox, “a word of this tale; and I suppose the narrator guessed as much, for he added, ‘O, you can see that it is true, for there is the rest of the poker.’ I went to the grate and examined the poker, which, being an old one, had been much burned; and where the action of the fire had been fiercest and had worn away the iron, a piece of between two and three inches had been wrenched off and was missing. Still I could hardly credit that the human stomach could receive such a dose and remain ‘feeling,’ as the professed swallower of it said, ‘nothing particular.’ However the constant affirming of the first, united to the assent and rueful looks of the second, induced me to use the patient as though the account were true: I administered very strong medicines, and watched their effects constantly. The man eat and drank and slept as usual, and appeared to suffer nothing but from the effect of the medicines. At last, to my astonishment, the piece of the poker came away, and the man was as well as ever. The iron had undergone a regular process of digestion and the surface of it was deeply honey-combed by the action of the juices. This was a most singular case, and proves how the God of Nature has endowed our system with powers of sustaining and redressing the effects of our own follies.”
The tales of lycanthropy which are found in such different ages and remote countries, strongly supported the Doctor's theory. Virgil, and Ovid in his story of Lycaon, had only adapted a popular superstition to their purposes. And like its relator he regarded as a mere fable the legend which Pliny has preserved from the lost works of Evanthes a Greek author not to be despised. Evanthes had found it written among the Arcadians that a man from the family of a certain author in that country was chosen by lot and taken to a certain lake; there he stript, hung his garments upon an oak, swam across and going into the wilderness, became a wolf, and herded with wolves for nine years; and if during that time he abstained from doing any hurt to men, he returned to the lake, recrossed it, resumed his human form, with the only change of being the worse, not for the wear indeed, but for the lapse of those nine years; and moreover found his clothes where he had left them. Upon which Pliny observes, Mirum est quo procedat Græca credulitas! Nullum tam impudens mendacium est quod teste careat.
A worse manner of effecting the same metamorphosis Pliny relates from the Olympionics of Agriopas; that at a human sacrifice offered by the Arcadians to Jupiter Lycæus, one Demænetus Parrhasius tasted the entrails, and was transformed into a wolf; at the expiration of ten years he resumed his original form, and obtained the prize of pugilism at the Olympic games.
But the Doctor differed from Pliny's opinion that all which is related concerning lycanthropy must be rejected or all believed;—Homines in lupos verti rursumque restitui sibi, falsum esse confidenter existimare debemus; aut credere omnia, quæ fabulosa tot seculis comperimus. The belief however, he admits, was so firmly fixed in the common people that their word for turncoat was derived from it;—Unde tamen ista vulgo infixa sit fama in tantum, ut in maledictis versipelles habeat, indicabitur. These fables the Doctor argued, could not invalidate the testimony of ancient physicians, that there was an actual and well known species of madness, in which men howled like wolves, and wandered by night about in lonely places or among the tombs. It was most severe at the commencement of spring; and was sometimes epidemic in certain countries. Pieter Forest whose character for accuracy and sagacity stands high among medical writers, affirms that he, in the sixteenth century, had seen the disease, and that it was as it had been described by the ancients. He must have been a credulous person who believed Constantinople had been so infested by these wolf-men, that the Grand Seignior and his guards had been obliged to go out against them; killing a hundred and fifty, and putting the rest of the pack to flight. This was a traveller's tale; and the stories related in books of demonology and witchcraft, concerning wretches who had been tried and executed for having, in the shape of wolves, killed and eaten children, and who had confessed their guilt, might be explained, like other confessions of witchcraft, by the effects of fear and tortures; yet there were cases upon which the Doctor thought no doubt could be entertained.