Folk-medicine : a chapter in the history of culture / by William George Black.

  • Black, William George, 1857-1932.
Date:
1883
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Folk-medicine : a chapter in the history of culture / by William George Black. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    mourning garments will cause the thoughtless wearer, if a New England superstition be right, to die within the year of the same disease of which the person died for whom the mourning is worn. In South Hampshire the snuff of a tallow-candle is given upon sugared bread and butter to ague patients to eat. Change of air is ordered by all doctors, but occasionally their patients do not understand them. They understand that any change of air will be beneficial, if the trouble is whooping-cough, for example; they say it will break the cough. Thus, I have known, in Glasgow, of children being taken to gasworks and to distilleries, and I have heard of an Ulster mother putting a can of coal tar under the patient's bed to cause a change of air. A curious custom in co. Clare, vouched for by a corre- spondent of the East Anglican, was to send the town band frequently to play in the evening in the cottage of a young woman afflicted with St. Vitus' dance, with the view of curing her. Some recollection of the tarantula is here. In Staffordshire, hanging an empty bottle up the chimney is thought a useful thing in cases of illness. To cure colic, in Towednack, in Cornwall, they advise you to stand on your head for a quarter of an hour. For poison this was a common remedy in olden times, the belief being that the poison would run out by the eyes— Man hieng den kranken an den beinen auf, and riss ihm nach einer weile ein aug aus, im glauben, das gift werde durch diese ofnung fliessen: ' tamen intoxicatus Albertus in Austria, et diu per pedes suspensus, oculum perdens evasit.' The Saxons said, if a man had eaten wolf's-bane, and had been duly placed on his head, some one should strike him many scarifications on the shanks, then the venom departs out through the incisions.* The common remedy for nose-bleeding, viz., slipping a key down between the clothes and the skin, has been said to be a relic of a symbolic act of the Norse, and connected * Grimm, vol. ii. p. 984 ; Cockayne, vol. ii. p. 155.