MEDIEVAL CURES

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 56, 15 September 1928, Page 18

MEDIEVAL CURES

LEECHCRAFT IN WALES MICE AND PORRIDGE (From "The Post's" Representative.) LONDON, 27th July. Several addresses on unusual medical subjects were given at the British Me-: dieal Association Conference at Cardiff. In the History of Medicine section, Dr. E. Bowland Williams, of Maeneloehog, dealing with "Welsh Physicians and the Renaissance," said there wore even to-day in districts of Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire still to bo found many revivals of the more bizarre and purely superstitious elements in medieval leeehcraft. Quite a short while ago in Pembrokeshire a colleague called in to attend a shot-gun wound discovered that manure had been lavishly applied as a styptic and first-aid dressing pending his arrival. Another stock feature of folk medicine and medieval leechcraft, proceeded the speaker, was the fantastic employment of drugs of animal origin. The eye of a newt and the toe of a frog, the tongue of a dog, an adder's fork, a lizard's leg, and an owlet's wing—all had their place in the strange endoctrinology. ■ A few such samples still lingered in use as domestic remedies in the principality. Bear's grease, so much lauded as a remedy in tho Middle Ages, might no logger be fashionable, but goose grease was still held as an inunction for wheezing chests and sore throats. Spider's web had still some vogue as a styptic for cuts, and salt bacon was quite a favourite dressing for boils. Even more primitive medicinal practices might be met with in Wales to-day. Students of the medieval Welsh book of the Myddfai Physicians would have frequently encountered in its pages a ritual in which some small animal such as a toad was directed to be incinerated, pulverised, and administered to a patient in food or drink. Dr. Williams said he was credibly informed that in Cardiganshire a little over.a year, ago, on the advice of a "wise woman,';' a mouse was roasted alive and its pulverised ashes mixed in porridge taken by' a boy who was ill. '.