Go, charge my goblins that they grind their joints
With dry convulsions; shorten up their sinews
With aged cramps.[263]

and

‘Leander ... went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont, and being taken with the cramp was drowned.’[264]

Robert Bayford, in his Enchiridion Medicum published in 1655, includes both wry-​neck and convulsions under the heading cramp, but he treats epilepsy separately on the ground that, as we know to be the case, it is not always associated with convulsions. He has no word ‘rheumatism’ at all.

Pepys (1664) carried about with him a hare’s foot as a charm against colic, i.e. against muscular spasm. Among Indians, Norwegians, and Central Africans, the foot of an elk was a charm against epilepsy. Pepys also recites a charm against cramp:

Cramp, be thou faintless
As our Lady was sinless
When she bare Jesus.

In this charm the word cramp seems to refer to the painful muscular spasms of labour. Pepys, as we know, suffered from colic, but not from epilepsy, so in using a hare’s foot as a charm against colic he was probably employing a charm against epilepsy. In like manner the ‘rheumatic ring’ of to-day seems to be the lineal descendant of the cramp-​ring of aforetime, and the confusion of nomenclature has doubtless not affected its efficacy. Folk-​medicine serves rather to confirm than to elucidate the confusion, for in Suffolk moles’ feet are carried as a charm against rheumatism, but in Sussex against cramp. In Devonshire a dried frog is worn as a cure for fits.

Boswell, in his description of Johnson at the time of their tour to the Hebrides, uses the word ‘cramp’ in its earlier significance. ‘His head,’ he says, ‘and sometimes also his body, shook with a kind of motion like the effect of a palsy: he appeared to be frequently disturbed by cramps, or convulsive contractions, of the nature of that distemper called St. Vitus’s dance.’

It may be asked how it came about that rings were used in the first instance as a remedy for epilepsy. It has occurred to me that their use may have originated in the time-​honoured belief that an epileptic seizure may be aborted by ligature of a limb or part above the situation in which the warning ‘aura’ commences. Galen, Alexander of Tralles, Rhazes, and Avicenna, among the earlier writers on medicine, all recommend the measure.

THE OFFICE OF CONSECRATING THE CRAMP-RINGS