Chapter X (2)

In the light of examples like these we must interpret many prescriptions which have been hastily put down as cases of transplantation, or have been turned by the folk themselves into transplantation formulæ. For instance, a Gipsy remedy for fever bids the sufferer go before sunrise to a little tree, scratch his left little finger, and smear the blood on the tree, saying: “Go away, fever; go away, pain; {150} go away into the tree, whence thou hast come; thither go thou, fever!”[150.1] No specific tree is indicated; and there can be little doubt that the original words of this ban have been forgotten, and meaningless rhymes substituted--so far at least as the words “Go away into the tree whence thou hast come,” which rhyme in the original with the two previous lines. So also, in Dr. Colerus’ collection of remedies from the Mark of Brandenburg, we find that, to cure the toothache, a splinter must be taken from a willow, and the teeth pricked with it until they bleed; the blood must be allowed to drip upon the splinter, which must be then cunningly put back into the tree, covered with the bark and plastered with mud, that it may grow together again. This prescription is still current in various parts of Germany and among some of the non-German populations of Eastern Prussia. In Pomerania it appears with the addition that the performance must be in silence, and the variation that the tree must be one struck by lightning.[150.2] If it were simply intended to transplant the toothache into the tree, there would be no need to be careful about the healing of the wound. But here, as in the cases of children passed through split trees, it is of importance to the recovery and after-life of the patient that the tree recover and be allowed to flourish. Moreover, a lightning-struck tree would, in heathen times, have been sacred; and the requirement of silence confirms its sacred character. The object of the ceremony, therefore, is not a transplantation of the disease, but a healing union of the diseased tooth {151} with the tree. In the province of Liège it is sufficient to touch the tooth with the splinter.[151.1] The rite there appears to be in decay, for the real intention to incorporate in the tree blood from the tooth and surrounding gums is manifest from a variation current at least as early as the seventeenth century, when it is mentioned in England by John Aubrey. It consists in scarifying the gum with an iron nail, and burying the nail in the tree.[151.2] And Sir Kenelm Digby gravely prescribes it, directing the nail to be driven up to the head into a wooden beam, which of course is a makeshift for a tree.[151.3] Kuhn, reporting the same practice from the Mark, says expressly that the tooth must be bored with the nail until the blood comes, the nail must then be driven into the north side of an oak where the sun does not shine, and then so long as the tree stands the patient will have no more toothache.[151.4] About Liège the nail is, according to one prescription, to be drawn from a coffin. According to another it must be a new nail and must be driven into the first tree you come to.[151.5] At Pforzheim, when a tooth is drawn, it is to be nailed into a young tree, and the bark drawn over it; if the tree be cut down the toothache will return.[151.6] At Agnethlen, in Transylvania, {152} the sufferer bores a hole in a tree, chews with the aching tooth a piece of bread, swallows half and spits the rest into the tree, saying: “Tree, I give thee half of what I have; take away all my pain, and convey it down into the earth!”[152.1] The consumption of half the bread by the patient is conclusive against transplantation. And with this we may compare a recipe against the rickets in use in Schleswig-Holstein. The sick child is rubbed over with a handful of oats, and the oats are then sown in a secret place; as they grow the rickets disappear.[152.2]

In view of the cases I have cited it may be doubted whether the intention (at all events, the original intention) of many of the prescriptions of hair, saliva, food and other things belonging to the patient, to be given to the lower animals was transplantation, and not rather union with another and a healthy body. Thus, in Kerry and Leitrim a cure for the whooping-cough is to pour some milk into a saucer, let a ferret drink some of it, and give the rest to the sufferer. In Antrim the child is passed thrice under a jackass, to which is afterwards given a bit of oaten bread, and the child is made to eat what the animal leaves.[152.3] Transplantation in both these examples is out of the question, because the child does not feed until the other creature has finished. So in the Panjab stammering is cured by hanging in a tree a cup, which is kept filled for forty days with water for the birds. The last few drops they leave every day are drunk by the patient. And a remedy in the north of India for boils is to move over the {153} part affected some treacle and parched wheat, and afterwards distribute these things among some Brahman boys.[153.1] The food, it will be noted, does not actually touch the diseased part: the symbol is reckoned sufficient. But the destination of the food for persons of the sacred caste renders it impossible that transfer of the disease is intended. A ceremony in use among the Southern Slavs as a cure for a fretful child directs the drawing of water in a vessel of greenwood. The mother then, with the child on her arm, dips firebrands thrice into the water, saying: “The Vila weds her son and invites my Marko to the wedding. I am sending not my Marko, but his weeping.” The child is made to drink as much as it can of the water thus brought into contact with the drying, or perhaps the hallowing, power of the fire, the rest is poured over the dog or cat of the household, the vessel is thrown to the ground and left there all night.[153.2] The entire meaning of this curious ceremony is not very clear; but it can hardly be intended to transfer the constant weeping of the infant to the dog, or the cat. In Buffalo Valley, Pennsylvania, certain diseases are cured by allowing a black cat to eat some of the soup given to the patient--a remedy probably brought from Germany.[153.3] Here again transference is improbable, seeing that a black cat is a magical animal: we should rather apply the reasoning in reference to Reginald Scot’s remedy for the flux. It is more doubtful whether the same can be said of a Jewish leechcraft, quoted by Dr. Strack from Tholedoth Adam, which bids a woman suffering from undue menstruation {154} bake some of her blood in bread and give it to a pig to devour.[154.1] But in Tuscany, when one spits blood, ants are to be caught, put into the blood and left there all night. Mr. Leland, in recording this, observes that Marcellus quotes a conjuring verse where ants are said to have no blood.[154.2] If we may look upon the saying as embodying a general belief, we may suppose that their bloodlessness would be held to react upon the sufferer.

Marcellus mentions a number of prescriptions which cannot be cases of transplantation, but rather intended to unite a diseased body with a sound one for the benefit of the former. Take his remedy for a gathering in the ear by injecting the warm urine of a boy under the age of puberty. Or where incontinence of urine is to be cured by making water in a dog’s sleeping-place, saying the while: “Let me not make water in my own bed, like a dog.” Or the recommendation to apply the cut hairs of a boy under puberty to the suffering foot of a gouty patient. A prescription extolled as _et praesens et maximum_ for consumptives, even when apparently beyond hope, consists in administering the saliva or foam of a horse in warm water for three days: the horse will die, and the sick man recover.[154.3] Even here, in spite of the horse’s death, we have no warrant for supposing that the disease is transferred to him. The operation upon him is clearly to be attributed to the magical principle so fully discussed in this and {155} the previous chapter. The process is the converse of transplantation. Nothing that has touched the patient is brought back to the unfortunate horse. His death is caused by union through his own saliva with a sick body which absorbs his qualities of health and strength.

An old French remedy for a cough, and probably also for toothache, is traceable back to Marcellus. It was to spit in a frog’s mouth--a method of cure still in vogue in Shropshire and perhaps elsewhere in England.[155.1] No doubt it was a traditional remedy long before the Emperor’s physician gravely recorded it, and added that the patient must stand shod upon the bare earth under the bare heaven, on a Tuesday or Thursday at waning moon, and repeat seven times: _Argidam, margidam, sturgidam_. Moreover the patient is solemnly to ask the frog to take the toothache with her; “and then shalt thou let her go alive; and this shalt thou do on a fortunate day and at a fortunate hour.” O learned physician! This does appear, at least as Marcellus understood it, a case of transplantation; and it is no part of my business to combat every instance. I only desire to point out that Transplantation is a theory inadequate to account for many remedies which it has been dragged in to explain; and to express the doubt whether it be not after all a comparatively recent development in folk-medicine.

Saliva prescriptions, numerous as they are, need not detain us longer. Nor will I pause upon those of the fouler excrements. They are made, as we might expect, to subserve the purposes of healing, as well as those of witchcraft, {156} and in the same general manner. I shall, therefore, only add a few references at the foot of the page for the use of students.[156.1]

For various diseases the patient’s bath-water and fomentations, wherein are often mingled simples of different sorts, are in Germany, Hungary and Transylvania poured out upon a tree, into flowing water, into the churchyard, or upon dead human bones.[156.2] The Magyars, as a depilatory for children born with much hair on their bodies, put ashes on the four corners of the bath-tub, and throw into the water three potatoes, which they fling, after the bath, behind the oven. As the potatoes dry up, the hair is expected to disappear.[156.3]

Not only the bath-water and fomentations but also cloths and articles of clothing which have been in contact with {157} the patient, and especially with the diseased member, are subject to treatment for the purpose of healing, of causing, or of preventing disease. At Rauen, near Fürstenwald, in Northern Germany, the remedy for a violent headache is to bind a cloth round the head at night, and take it on the following morning to a wise man, who will charm not the head, but the cloth.[157.1] Among the Transylvanian Gipsies a certain kind of sore is cured by covering it with a red rag and pegging the rag by night in a hole in a tree. The words used on the occasion are: “Stay thou here, until the rag become a beast, the beast a tree, the tree a man, to strike thee dead!” So far as they have a meaning they point to transplantation, though not conclusively. Dr. von Wlislocki, who reports them, suggests they contain a reminiscence of a Gipsy Creation-myth. If so, they are probably archaic; but this is doubtful.[157.2] An old physician relates of a patient who had a violent pain in the arm that it was healed by a plaster of red coral beaten up with oak-leaves, which was kept on the part until suppuration and then in the morning put into an auger-hole in the root of an oak, looking towards the east, and the hole stopped with a peg of the same tree. The pain ceased, but returned more sharply than before when the peg was taken out.[157.3] In Middle Silesia plasters and bandages from wounds must only be thrown into flowing water--certainly never into the fire, lest the hurt be made incurable.[157.4] The Masurs in East Prussia, after suffering from an attack of fever, and not until it is over, take off the patient’s shirt and carry it, after sunset or before sunrise, if possible on a {158} Thursday, to a cross-road and suspend it on the sign-post.[158.1] It is a French prescription for hastening a slow delivery to bind the woman’s girdle about the church-bell and sound the bell thrice.[158.2] In 1630 the wife of Francesco Noverta of Pordenone was brought before the Inquisition in Italy for taking her husband’s shirt to a wise man to be “signed,” in order to cure him of some disease. The man signed it with a crown, repeating sacred words and invoking the saints. He did more. He gave her an oil to anoint the patient’s back and stomach, a piece of bread for him to eat, and certain herbs to be put under his bolster, together with a powder. But when she got home, so she told the holy inquisitors, she threw all these things on the fire, and kept only the shirt: she had more confidence in the charm than the simples.[158.3] These cases, in which there is no transplantation, may perhaps be allowed to interpret the ambiguity of some of the following. The Saxons of the Seven Cities cure the swelling of the glands of the neck by stealing a piece of bacon over night and binding it round the throat with a rag, and the next morning hanging the bandage on a tree, or throwing it in the fire. In the former case, the spell to be uttered, while removing the bandage, is: “Tree, thou hast many knots; take away my knots also.” In the latter, it is: “The knotman has seven sons; the knotwife has seven daughters; they married, lived together and did not agree; they parted and disappeared like the bacon in the fire. So, in God’s name, let the knots disappear in N. N.’s neck, that he may enjoy pure the Holy Supper of the Body {159} and Blood of Our Lord. Amen.”[159.1] Galician Jews cure infantine convulsions by throwing articles of the child’s clothing into a stream where it divides into two branches, and crying thrice: “Here hast thou thine; give me mine.” This is, of course, a prayer for the child’s health. They are also careful not to hang swaddling clothes out of doors to dry, nor to drop them on the ground, else the child whose they are will lose its rest.[159.2] The garb of Italian babies must likewise be tenderly treated in washing, else the infants will be afflicted with various pains. Abruzzian babe-clothes must not be washed in the water whence horses have drunk, lest the babe’s tender skin be heated. A Tuscan baby is cured of a certain disorder by putting its clothes in boiling water with a nail, some laurel and garden-flowers, like rose or jasmine, and afterwards rinsing them in flowing water.[159.3] Against a menstruation too copious a Galician Jewess washes her own shift together with her husband’s night-dress.[159.4] The intention here seems to be not to attempt the absurdity of transferring the menstruation to the husband, but by uniting the patient to a healthy man through the contact of their clothing, to obtain for her that quality of his whereof she stands especially in need. Conversely, one of the remedies of Italian women for suppressed menstruation is to send the sufferer’s shift to the wash with the linen of a woman who has just been delivered; and they firmly believe that a washerwoman may cause them painful menstruation by beating their linen too hard, or by using burning coals with the ashes in {160} making the lye.[160.1] Nor must we forget here the Bosnian rite for procuring conception, referred to in a previous chapter. The barren woman’s wedding-garment is not worn by the quick woman wound about her body for the purpose of transferring the barrenness to herself. On the contrary, she wears it that her prolific influence may thus be communicated to her friend; and she continues to wear it until that effect is produced.

Other things that have been brought into contact with the body may also be efficaciously treated. In Donegal the piece of turf whereon a sick cow first treads on getting up is cut out and hung against the wall; and the cow is expected to recover.[160.2] Formerly in France a limping cow was healed by cutting out the turf whereon the lame foot had trodden and putting it to dry on a hedge. To cure quartan fever a certain herb was plucked secretly and in silence, and thrown to the winds.[160.3] In the seventeenth century a prescription for epilepsy was three nails made on Midsummer Eve driven over their heads into the place where the patient had fallen, his name being uttered the while.[160.4] For spasms at the heart it is recommended in Transylvania to lie on the back on the turf. The length and breadth of the patient’s body is then marked, and the turf to the thickness of a finger cut out, if possible in one piece, and thrown into a brook with the words: “Spring-wife, spring-wife, take the water from my heart; I give thee what lay under my heart.”[160.5] In Thuringia, to heal sores {161} on the body three crosses are made with a bit of comfrey on the sores before sunrise, and the comfrey is then buried in a place where it will quickly rot, and whither the patient is not likely soon to come.[161.1] A like remedy is given in the _Grihya-sutra_ of Âpastamba. If a wife be affected with consumption, or be otherwise sick, one who has to observe chastity is to rub her limbs with young lotus-leaves, still unrolled, and with lotus-roots and certain formulæ; the leaves and roots are afterwards thrown away towards the west.[161.2] For whooping-cough, a mother in Norfolk looks for a dark spider in the house, and having found it holds it over the child’s head, repeating thrice:

“Spider, as you waste away, Whooping-cough no longer stay.”

She then hangs the spider in a bag over the mantelpiece--formerly no doubt it was hung in the chimney--and when it dries up the cough will be gone.[161.3] A feverish patient, among the Jews of Galicia, wraps a hair taken from his body about a louse, and throws the creature away. While, against epilepsy, a black hen is rent in pieces over the sick man; or a cock is slaughtered and buried, its head being first cut off on the threshold of a barn: with the decay of its flesh the epileptic recovers health.[161.4] The old French superstitions recorded by Thiers prescribe for various diseases a branch of a plum-tree hung to dry in the chimney, a cabbage stolen from a neighbour’s garden and hung up to dry, nine grains of barley put into a bottle of {162} clear water, a hard-cooked egg put into an anthill, certain drugs wrapped in a piece of new cloth and thrown into the fire. They do not in every case mention that these articles must be first applied to the patient; but it is tolerably clear that this is meant.[162.1] And it must also be inferred that the cock in the Galician prescription was formerly brought into similar contact, though perhaps in this case, as in many others throughout Europe, the touching has fallen into disuse. The black hen, it is obvious, could not be torn in pieces without its blood falling on the patient and so bringing it into union with the disease. Remedies of the kind under consideration are naturally most in vogue for external diseases, such as warts, boils and sties. But enough: examples of their application to all kinds of disease are endless.

I have mentioned some cases where corpses have played remedial parts. A few more illustrations may be added, more clearly to bring out the real meaning of the prescriptions, which are divisible into two classes--the one wherein the patient himself is brought into contact with the body, or with some article that has belonged to it, or been in contact with it; the other wherein articles belonging to the patient, or which have been part of, or in contact with, his body are deposited in the coffin, or the grave, and thus brought into permanent connection with the dead. The intention of both appears to be the same, namely, to bring the disease into union with the corpse, in order that, as the latter suffers decay and dissolution, it also may decay and perish.

In enumerating a few instances of the former class, let me first refer to the fact that touching or stroking with {163} the hand of a corpse is a remedy known in every part of Europe for superficial growths like wens, tetters, and swollen glands. In September 1892, a fashionably dressed young woman was one day seen hovering about a physician’s residence in the north of Berlin. When he went out she met him and timidly prayed him to take her, when he had an opportunity, to a dead body. He thought she must be suffering from overstrain or mental disorder, and brusquely refused her. In nowise daunted, however, she begged him earnestly to grant her request, explaining that her object was to remove a deformity. As she said this, she laid bare a delicate white hand blemished by a bony outgrowth, known among surgeons as _exostosis_. The medical man became interested; and it was not long before he stood with her in the presence of a corpse. The lady grasped the cold right hand and with it repeatedly and silently stroked the ugly excrescence. Then, without speaking, she left the room in all haste; nor was the physician able to learn who she was, or what had led her to seek this means of relief.[163.1] In the good old days, when what was called Justice was chiefly exhibited in hanging men with short shrift on every convenient pretext and at every convenient place, this remedy was much easier to obtain than it is to-day. In Europe it was universal; and perhaps it was partly the facility for touching an executed criminal that led to a preference in popular pharmacopœia for such corpses. Partly also it may have arisen from another cause. The victims of violence are often regarded as endowed after {164} death with extraordinary virtue. When that violence took the form of persecution for adherence to the Church, the Church herself encouraged and systematised the superstition to her own profit. Popular sympathy with unmerited suffering extended the Church’s doctrine to other murders, judicial murders among them. And often the Church did not hesitate to sanction the popular canonisation, and appropriate the material gains that followed. But beyond all that the Church could sanction, there remained a margin constantly supplied by the bloodthirsty tribunals, as well as by private enterprise. The former may have been more regular in their action; but one thing is certain. Their victims were more uniformly derived from the classes which were chiefly concerned in forming and preserving tradition. The feeling of oppression would be likely to generalise all executions into martyrdoms, entailing miraculous powers analogous to those recognised by the Church. This would be enough to intensify the operation of any potency believed to be the ordinary property of a corpse, and so to favour the resort to the bodies of criminals.[164.1]

Be this as it may, remedies derived from the dead were, and still are, popular. The Saxons of the Seven Cities cure wens and scrofula by drawing a silken thread through a corpse’s hand and then binding it round the patient’s neck. They hold that a silken band out of a grave is a protection against epilepsy. Earth from a sucking infant’s grave is {165} put upon the mother’s breast to dry up her milk. Gout is healed by rubbing a rag from a dead man’s clothes on the suffering parts and hanging it all night upon a tree. Against cramp, a string wherewith a corpse has been measured is worn on the body next to the skin. A drunkard’s craving for drink is stayed by giving him some of what he best loves, poured over a silver coin which has been placed in a corpse’s mouth. Diseases of the eyes are cured by going early on a fine Sunday morning in spring to a pious man’s grave, and washing the eyes in the dew that lies upon it. Herbs grown in the churchyard, and gathered on Good Friday when the bells are sounding for service, are good against every kind of sickness.[165.1] Among the Poles and Masurs it is believed that to smell a flower growing in the churchyard causes permanent loss of the sense of smell.[165.2] The Negro population of Barbados resorts to the touch of a dead hand for all swellings and chronic pains, and believes that to wash the eyes in rum which has been used to wash a corpse is to be safe from disease of the eyes for the future.[165.3] In the Abruzzi the hand of a dead priest has potency against scrofulous tumours, and a certain remedy for headache is to rub the forehead and temples with the tears of a dying man.[165.4] A prescription in Middle Silesia, against epilepsy and against toothache is a ring smithied from a coffin-nail found in a grave.[165.5] In the Netherlands {166} an aching tooth is rubbed with a bone from the churchyard; or, in the province of Namur, the sufferer goes to bite a cross erected on the wayside where a violent death has occurred.[166.1] The bone, among the Masurs and generally in Prussia, is replaced by the index-finger of a corpse.[166.2] In old French belief it should be a tooth, if possible the tooth of a man who has come to a violent end, as by hanging; and the best time for its application is on Holy Saturday when the bells are ringing. Other French prescriptions are: for fever, to hang round the neck a human bone taken from the graveyard, or the hem torn (not cut) from a winding-sheet; for colic or _lapsus ani_, to cut the hem from a winding-sheet, pass it under the loins and wear it as a girdle; for hydrophobia, pills made of the head of a man who has been hanged.[166.3] In Silesia water left on tombstones will send freckles away. At Gernsbach, in the neighbourhood of Spire, to smear a goitre with the wick of a lamp that has burnt in a dying man’s room will heal it.[166.4] To cure a Bosnian drunkard, extinguish in brandy one of the candles burning at the head of a corpse before the funeral, and give him the brandy to drink. Even a bit of the wick when the candle is put out in the ordinary course, {167} given in brandy, will be sufficient; or indeed brandy bought with a coin which has been used to close the eyes of the dead.[167.1] The last is doubtless a degenerate form of a superstition akin to that of the Transylvanian Saxons adduced just now. In the Lettish prescription the corpse’s mouth is to be washed out, and the water given to the tippler. After drinking it, we are told, he can never drink again, which is quite likely.[167.2] The reasoning which has given rise to all these beliefs perhaps applies also to the tradition in Wales, Ireland and the Isle of Man that it is unlucky to disturb old burial-places and old churches, and utilise their materials. Professor Rhys relates an example in which a farmer in the Ronnag, a small valley near South Barrule, in the Isle of Man, carted earth from an old burial-ground and used it to manure his fields. His cattle died, and every one attributed it to this cause. The farmer himself was convinced at last, and desisted from the desecration.[167.3] A similar story is told of a cattle-dealer in the parish of Templepatrick, near Belfast, who attempted to use the soil of an ancient fort as a top-dressing for his land.[167.4] We may compare with these instances a curious Manx curse: “May a stone of the church be found in the head of thy dwelling!”[167.5] It would seem as if that which had been part of, or had become by contact united with, the dead, or had been part of the subject of a taboo, were still, notwithstanding severance, in indissoluble connection with the remainder, and thus capable of communicating its evil effects or of bringing into similar connection any other {168} object. Too much stress, however, cannot be laid on this conjecture at present. The question needs further investigation.

The other class of prescriptions consists of such as the following. An English cure for boils mentioned by Mr. Thiselton Dyer was to poultice for three days and nights, and then to place the poultices, cloths and all, in the coffin of a body about to be buried.[168.1] In Germany, when a sucking babe dies, the mother puts a bottle of her milk in the coffin, and then the breast dries up without making her ill.[168.2] To the same end a South Slavonic mother sticks in the infant’s shift over the breast two pins, probably to be taken from her own. The coffin-lid must not be nailed at the head and foot, else the mother will bear no more, or if she bear, it will be a difficult labour.[168.3] In Silesia, to destroy lice, bugs and moths, it is recommended to catch a few specimens, bottle them up in a quill and secretly by a waning moon lay the quill in the coffin of a spotless maiden.[168.4] The population of North Carolina is mainly of German descent. There, by the same process of logic, it is forbidden in making garments for the dead to bite the thread, lest the teeth rot.[168.5] The Transylvanian Saxons spit into an open grave to heal sore throat.[168.6] In East Prussia, as in West Sussex, a child is cured of a certain nightly offence by being taken to an open grave to repeat it.[168.7] In Donegal, warts are got rid of by throwing some clay from under {169} your right foot in the path by which a funeral is going, and by saying: “Corpse of clay, carry my warts away.” This must be done three times, and as the corpse decays in the grave the warts will vanish.[169.1] As might be expected, to bring warts into contact with a corpse is a specially efficacious means of getting rid of them. In the Obererzgebirge warts or any other superficial ailments are rubbed with a piece of linen, which is then laid in the coffin with a corpse.[169.2] To recover from the ague in the Netherlands the sufferer’s garter used to be tied round a gallows.[169.3] When a death occurs in Poland, if anything has been stolen from the family, a similar object, or a piece of the same stuff, is laid in the coffin; and as it decays the thief withers away and dies. It is even enough, in case of robbery, to lay a portion of the stolen goods in the churchyard.[169.4] We considered in the last chapter the identification of the thief with the property stolen, and no more need be added on the subject.

The principle which underlies all these practices dictated the sympathetic treatment of wounds by washing and keeping clean and bright the instrument inflicting them--a treatment taught by Paracelsus, believed in by Bacon and proclaimed as a valuable discovery by Sir Kenelm Digby, who learned it in France. Though long since discredited by science, it is still in use among the peasantry of England, and can be traced backwards into savagery. A few instances will suffice to exhibit the vast area over which it {170} is found, and the different modes of its application. In Sussex a few years ago Mrs. Latham saw it actually in use. A man had been accidentally wounded by a sword-stick, and the whole time he was confined to his bed the sword-stick was kept hung at his bed’s head, and was polished at stated intervals day and night, and anxiously examined lest a spot of rust be found thereon; for that would have been a token that the wounded man would die.[170.1] In Suffolk, if a horse be lamed by treading on a nail, the nail must be found, cleaned and kept bright and well greased; and in dressing a human wound the old plaster must be buried, not burnt, else the wound will not heal.[170.2] Similar treatment of a wound by a tool or weapon was practised within the memory of living men by the descendants of the Dutch settlers in the Hudson River.[170.3] About Schaffhausen and Solothurn it is held that if one be pricked with a needle, the wound will heal the sooner if the needle be at once plunged into wax.[170.4] In the Tirol, in order to prevent a wound from giving trouble, the weapon that has caused it is immediately stuck into ash-wood.[170.5] About Siena a nail which has inflicted any hurt is gently warmed over the fire with a clove of garlic in oil prepared from herbs gathered on Saint John’s day, and it is then used to sprinkle the oil about.[170.6] In Esthonia, if you cut your finger, you are advised to bite the blade of the knife, and the wound will then cease to bleed.[170.7] Among the Galician Jews, if a child fall on the floor, the pain will pass away, provided {171} water be poured on the floor, at the spot where the child came in contact with it.[171.1] These superstitions are not a whit more civilised than those of the races we call savage. Dr. Boas mentions a tribe of North American Indians who are very careful to keep the arrow that has wounded a friend concealed, and as far from the fire as possible; for he would be very ill if, while still covered with blood, it were put into the fire.[171.2] Melanesians keep the arrow, when extracted, in a damp place, or in cool leaves; then the inflammation will be little and soon subside. A story is told by Dr. Codrington of a man who aimed at another with a ghost-shooter, that is to say, a magically prepared arrow which does not actually reach the foe, but is only believed to do so by being directed towards him. In this case the man’s next of kin, his sister’s child, happened to come between him and the object of his aim, and he felt sure he had hit it full. To prevent inflammation of the imaginary wound he put the contents of his ghost-shooter into water, and the child took no hurt. If a Melanesian have really shot another, and can get back the arrow, he puts it into the fire. To heat the wound he will keep the bow near the fire; and the bowstring will be kept taut and occasionally pulled, to bring on tension of the nerves and tetanus in the wounded man. Or a bundle of certain leaves, tied on the bow will produce a fatal result. Nor is this all. The assailant and his friends will drink hot and burning juices, and chew irritating leaves; they will burn pungent and bitter herbs to produce an irritating smoke. The wound by his arrow has set up such union between the shooter and his victim that these proceedings {172} are expected to react upon the latter.[172.1] The Zulus are said to have the like belief. They think that if the corpse of a slain enemy swell up, they themselves will suffer pain in the intestines. If they have time, therefore, they tear out the entrails of their fallen foes; if not, they pierce the navel with an assegai, as was done to the body of young Bonaparte, the Imperialist Pretender.[172.2]

“A hair of the dog that bit you” is a remedy which has passed into a proverb. In dealing with witchcraft we had occasion to note some instances of its application, as when the dust of a witch’s footprint is rubbed on the bespelled animal. The Abruzzians hold the bite of a cat to be venomous; and their prescription for it is a bit of the same cat’s fur applied with pounded garlic. So, for a serpent-bite a portion of the skin of the creature is put on the wound; but, as Signor Finamore remarks, the question is to get it.[172.3] In Sicily the sting of one of the small scorpions found in damp places in the island is healed by scorpion-oil prepared from the same scorpion. The mode of preparing the oil is to decapitate the animal and plunge it into a vessel of oil, which is then closed tightly.[172.4] In Devonshire a person who is bitten by a viper is advised at once to kill the creature and rub the wound with its fat; and the flesh of a rattlesnake is accounted the best cure for its own bite in the Northern States of America.[172.5] In Belgium a dog’s bite is to be healed by inducing a bitch to {173} lick the sore.[173.1] The reason for the treatment is obscure in some of these cases; but we shall probably be right in referring its origin to the desire to set up union between the victim and the animal inflicting the wound, by means of a detached portion of the latter’s substance. This view is strengthened by the treatment directed, in the neighbourhood of Masulipatam, for a scorpion which has stung a man. The brute is to be caught by slipping a noose over its tail, and tied to something to prevent its wandering. For the more it wanders, the more the poison will wander in the man’s body; while to kill it may have the effect of killing its victim. Here the union by means of the injected poison is already complete, and the scorpion is dealt with accordingly.[173.2]

Folk-leechcraft thus provides us with further illustration of the theory lying at the foundation of the story-incident of the Life-token. A severed portion of the body, or any of its issues, or anything once in contact with it, though now detached, is none the less believed to continue in real, if unapparent, connection with it. Whatever, therefore, is undergone by the one, is undergone also by the other. For the purposes of healing, as of injury, to affect the one is to affect the other. It is curious that a large number of the remedies prescribed are of a character that, judging from the examples of witchcraft in the last chapter, one would suppose calculated to inflict injury rather than to heal. To hang in the chimney things which have become united with the patient’s body, or to put them into a coffin, if done with malicious intent, would certainly result in evil to the victim. We must, however, be at all times prepared to {174} find tradition inconsistent. In the cases referred to, the disease is thought of, rather than the patient, as identified with the object operated on; and the intention is to destroy the disease by causing it to waste away. Probably the prescription was at first applied only to excrescences and other diseased growths, like warts, tumours and wens. These alone were touched by the dead hand, or by the cloth, or the spider, which was to be enclosed in the grave, or hung in the chimney. The remedy having been tried for them, would be extended to other ailments, without adverting to the reason of its primitive limitation. So far as regards objects committed to the keeping of the dead, a comparison of love-charms comprising the same process will have suggested an alternative explanation, namely, that they are brought thus into permanent contact with the corpse for the purpose of putting them under the influence of the departed spirit. This is a less materialistic explanation, and one that will have weight with students who can estimate the importance, in savage life, of the worship of the dead. It is possible that there may be an element of truth in it, as well as in the explanation which regards the objects as merely intended to be affected by the physical decay and corruption of the corpse. But, either way, is clearly necessary the postulate that the disease in the patient’s body is capable of being affected by the influence, whatever it may be, on the objects in contact with the dead,--that in them, and by means of them, the patient himself is actually in contact also.