QUACKS OF OTHER DAYS

Thames Star, Volume LVII, Issue 16212, 29 September 1924, Page 3

QUACKS OF OTHER DAYS

Both Washington and Cavonr were killed by their doctors, for when they were both ill their physicians, actingaccording to custom, bl-d them, and through their ignorance bled the two great men to death. To us the old idea that bleeding is the sovereign cure for all ills seems ridiculous, but there were beliefs and practices even more amazing than this. Dr. Johnston and his contemporaries believed that a touch from the King was sufficient to cure scrofula, and Pepys in his diary speaks of the queen’s illness, and °ays that “she had ito be shaved, pigeons put to her feet.” We are inclined to smile when we hear that in Brittany a fried mouse is declared to cure smallpox, or that a spider in a nutshell worn around the neck keeps away fever, or that three hairs from the cross on an ass’s back will cure whooping cough though the ass will die; but our grandparents and their grandparents had ideas equally astonishing. “Snails,V said, (our forefathers, “boiled in barley water will cure an ordinary cough.” Should a sixteenth century person be afflicted with warts, then, said, the book of charms. “Put three droppes of the blood of a wart in a eldern leaf and -burie it in the earthe and the warts will vanish away.” Another queer remedy, this time for gout, was to place nowers of the lily of the vadey in a bottle, bury the bottle -in an ant heap, and then, after a month, unearth the bottle, and the liquor inside would ue a perfect cure. Headers of Beaumont and Flet-' cher’s comedy, “The Knight of the Burning Pestle,” will remember that instructions are given to sufferers from chilblains to rub the feet well with a •mouse skin and .to roll the feet and ankles in hot embers!