Curious Remedies.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 5271, 30 May 1895, Page 1

Curious Remedies.

It was wont to be taken for granted that Nature was all wrong, and that Bhe did not know her business. For instance, instead of bringing the edges of a wound together, and allowing them to unite, old chirurgeons tore them wider apart by a hideous forceps, and filled the wound with ecid balsams and other kinds of dressings, " lest it should heal too soon." The virtue of cold water was wholly unsuspected. Scalding oil was used for dressing sores. So was the oil of kittens, a mysterious compound prepared by boiling live cats, coat and all, in olive oil.

Writing on tumours, the preceptor of Harvey, who discovered the circulation of the blood, says: — "If it bo a movable one, I cut it away with a red-hot iron, that sears as it cuts ; but if it be adherent to the cheßt, I cut; it without bleeding with a wooden or horn knife, soaked in aquafortis, with which, havinp cut tbe Bkin, I dig out the rest with my finger*" Thiß was surgery lesa than three hundred years ago! The eighteenth century opened with an established system o! everlasting bleeding. The ory wfes, " Come and be blooded." People were "blooded" before they went on a long stage-coach journey j before they made their wills; before they did anything unusual* If a woman fainted, she was bled : if a man broke his leg, the leech came with his lancet. Mr William Masters, an eminent surgeon in Worcester* shire, was so far gone in consumption that he wbb not able to Btand alone. His medical attendant advised him to "lose cix ounces of blood every day for a fortnight, if he lived co long !" Dr Caiuß, a celebrated physician (1610 — 1576), tells ub that " little dogs are good to assuage the Bickness of the stomach, being oftentimes thereunto applied as a plaster preservative. The .disease of the gentleman or gentlewoman entereth into the dog." People went literally to the doga in the hands of these old physicians. Here is a remedy which one of them prescribes for gont : " Take a young puppy, all one colour, and cut him in two pieces through the back alive, and lay one Bide hot to the grieved place." Another cure f°)fe gout consisted of " raspings of a human skull unburied."

Bhenmatio people were buried up to the chin in mod baths ; cows were ' brought info the bedrooms of consumptive patiente, their breath being regarded as a specific. Gold and pearls were taken internally by the eick who could afford the remedy. Baxter relates how he nearly lost Mb life by swallowing a golden bullet. On another occasion, to Btop bleeding at the noae he used, by his physician's advice, the moBS from a dead man's skull. John Wesley, in his "Primitive Physic/ prescribes "six middling pills of. cobwebs" for ague. ■>.;■.''

"The balsam ol bats" waß a favourite remedy of ,Sir' Tfieadore Mayerne, Coqrt physician to Jamea 1., Cbarlea I. and Charles 11. One of the medical advisers of Queen Elizabeth used to prescribe "a small young mouse roasted " for a ohild with a certain nervous mslady.

Mice, too, supplied the remedy ordered for "squinancy"— -quinsy. "Take a silk thread dipped in the blood of a mouse, and let the party swallow it down, and ib will cure him." Our forefathers seemed to have valued the internal rather than the external use of eosp. It -was prescribed 'ftur calculus by a great light in the medical world of his day, called Hartley. The doctor himself died of calculus, in 1757, after swallowing, it was said, two hundred pounds weight of soap. In fact, .whatever was nasty and whatever lowered the system Beem to have been considered good remedies in these good old days. -: Much virtue was also attributed to thinga that were ghastly. A ring of ■the hinge of a coffin was thought to ,ye cramps. The chips of a gallows on whio a several persons had been hanged, whet worn in a bag round the neck, were pronounced an. infallible cure for ague. The stroke of the hand of a man who had been cut down from the gallows-tree dispelled tumours of the glands.