"I never gets sea boils," one old chap told me the other day.
"How is that?" I asked.
"Oh! I always cuts my nails on a Monday, so I never has any."
There is a great belief in fairies on the coast. A man came to me once to cure what he was determined to believe was a balsam on his baby's nose. The birthmark to him resembled that tree. More than one had given currency if not credence to the belief that the reason why the bull's-eye was so hard to hit in one of our running deer rifle matches was that we had previously charmed it. If a woman sees a hare without cutting out and keeping a portion of the dress she is then wearing, her child will be born with a hare-lip.
When stripping a patient for examination, I noticed that he removed from his neck what appeared to be a very large scapular. I asked him what it could be. It was a haddock's fin-bone—a charm against rheumatism. The peculiarity of the fin consists in the fact that the fish must be taken from the water and the fin cut out before the animal touches anything whatever, especially the boat. Any one who has seen a trawl hauled knows how difficult a task this would be, with the jumping, squirming fish to cope with.
Protestant and Catholic alike often sew up bits of paper, with prayers written on them, in little sacks that are worn around the neck as an amulet; and green worsted tied around the wrist is reported to be a never-failing cure for hemorrhage.
Every summer some twenty thousand fishermen travel "down North" in schooners, as soon as ever the ice breaks sufficiently to allow them to get along. They are the "Labrador fishermen," and they come from South Newfoundland, from Nova Scotia, from Gloucester, and even Boston. Some Newfoundlanders take their families down and leave them in summer tilts on the land near the fishing grounds during the season. When fall comes they pick them up again and start for their winter homes "in the South," leaving only a few hundreds of scattered "Liveyeres" in possession of the Labrador.
We were much surprised one day to notice a family moving their house in the middle of the fishing season, especially when we learned that the reason was that a spirit had appropriated their dwelling.
Stephen Leacock would have obtained much valuable data for his essay on "How to Become a Doctor" if he had ever chanced to sail along "the lonely Labrador." In a certain village one is confidently told of a cure for asthma, as simple as it is infallible. It consists merely of taking the tips of all one's finger-nails, carefully allowed to grow long, and cutting them off with sharp scissors. In another section a powder known as "Dragon's Blood" is very generally used as a plaster. It appears quite inert and harmless. A little farther south along the coast is a baby suffering from ophthalmia. The doctor has only been called in because blowing sugar in its eyes has failed to cure it.
A colleague of mine was visiting on his winter rounds in a delightful village some forty miles south of St. Anthony Hospital. The "swiles" (seals) had struck in, and all hands were out on the ice, eager to capture their share of these valuable animals. But snow-blindness had incontinently attacked the men, and had rendered them utterly unable to profit by their good fortune. The doctor's clinic was long and busy that night. The following morning he was, however, amazed to see many of his erstwhile patients wending their way seawards, each with one eye treated on his prescription, but the other (for safety's sake) doctored after the long-accepted methods of the talent of the village—tansy poultices and sugar being the acknowledged favourites. The consensus of opinion obviously was that the stakes were too high for a man to offer up both eyes on the altar of modern medicine.