SOME CURIOUS SURVIVALS.

Evening Post, Volume LXXVII, Issue 102, 1 May 1909, Page 10

SOME CURIOUS SURVIVALS.

The Folk-Lore Society may have made p-I do not know — a special study of the curious survivals of mediaeval cures .and charms, not a few of which survive amongst the poor in cities as well as in -remote villages. I have met this week -with three casas of strange belief in cures unknown to science, but cherished, pj individuals at any rate, in South A young friend of mine, having whafc .seemed to be inchoate whoop-ing-cough, a tradesman who heard of it earnestly adviser that a bag of snails should be hung round her neck, This he knew, from ' personal experience, to be a certain cure. I heard when a boy in my native Kent of the excellence of live snails being rubbed up and down the backbone in cases of incipient phthisis'; 'and I- know a professionalman who attributes his recovery from threatened consumption to the fact that when sent to Jersey he was there fed .with a nutritive jelly that he considered to ba* calves-foot jelly until when, after six months, * he was told that ifc was 'mad 9 of' snails — a fact not mentioned earlier, for fear of prejudice. And I have bought pate d'eseargots in France, boxes of jujubes, which "I have sometimes."usefl. as "tests whether imagination would prevail over sense. A lady would accept one, and' when it- had been partially consumed with relish' I would tell her of what it, was made. If she ' was dominated by ' imagination and pt^jjldice, ,fche.su^csatenKjujube was got rid of otherwise • than -by deglutition ; if more-strohg-minfdedisne finished what she had begun with pleasure A mollusc is nearly pure albumen, and therefore nutritious, even when you have added salt, iodine, and bilge-water, and ■ manufactured an oyster ; but that to j hang a bag of snails round a child's necn. will cure whooping-cough is a form of faith-cure that requires an abnormal amount of faith. And yet my grandfather, . the leading doctor of Dover, personally used- a, bag of corks hung on to his bed-post as a prophylactic of cramp. The second case this weeK was told by my medK-o, who, in visiting a case ot' pleurisy, found an unpleasant smell, which increased at each visit until it became unbeatable. He rummaged about, and afc last stripped the bed, and then found its origin in a parcel oi rotting pig's trotters tied round the ankles of the young woman. An old relation in the country had told her that the feet of a recently killed pig tied round her shins and kept there would draw out the poison of the disease, and had supplied her with the means of cure she was trying. To the same practitioner occurred near here the following incident. Ifc was a case of meningitis. He told the father to get some ice and let a bagful be applied to the boy's head. Next day no reduction of temperature was apparent, and he asked if his directions i had beep followed. "Yes, I did as you ( tbld me. I got some' mice, and put them in a bag on his head, but it didn't do no good." ' j i am frequently asked as to drug- i cures for alcoholism, and my answer "is, | "I believe in all of them, and in 'none '■ of them. If, and while,' the patient believes in any of them, in a certain amount of cases a cure will be effected, which may or may not endure." I once • did much good to a woman who wanted to be free from the periodical craving for alcohol, by inducing^ her to take a teaspoonful of Worcester sauce when- [ ever she felt a desire for whisky. Probably if I had induced her t6 Believe j in sucking the kitchen poker- twice a day it would have, been, equally tonic and curative. ' ' But the survivals of antique imaginations, such as I have, described are likely to be of greater interest than the latest crop of American secret remedies for anything and everything. — "West- j rainsicr Gazette. !