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Page 27
It was a prevalent belief that the seventh son in a family had the gift
of curing diseases, and that he was by nature a doctor who could effect
cures by the touch of his hand. It was reported that such a man resided
in Iona, who had effected cures by rubbing the diseased part with his
hand on two Thursdays and two Sundays successively, doing so in the name
of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. It was requisite to the
cure that no fee should be taken by such endowed persons. In the West
of Scotland the formula of cure was different in different localities;
in some parts a mere touch was all that was necessary, in others, and
this was the more general method, some medicine was given to assist the
cure.
Written charms were also believed in as capable of effecting cures, or,
at least, of preventing people from taking diseases. I have known people
who wore written charms, sewed into the necks of their coats, if men,
and into the headbands of petticoats if women. These talismans, in many
cases, I have little doubt, did real good in this way, that they
supplied their wearers with a courage which sufficed to brace up their
nervous system--which drove out fear, in fact,--a very important
condition for health, as physicians well know. These talismans were so
generally and thoroughly believed in, and so numerous and apparently
well-attested were the evidences of their beneficial effects, that in
years not long past, medical men believed in their efficacy, and
promulgated various theories to account for it.
It was also an accepted belief that diseases could be transferred to
animals, and even to vegetables. Cures held to be so effected were,
according to one medical theory, cures by "sympathy." A few instances,
culled from a work published during the latter half of the seventeenth
century (1663), entitled _The Usefulness of Experimental Philosophy_,
will illustrate this theory:--A medical man had been very ill of an
obstinate _marasmar_ (?) which so consumed him that he became quite a
skeleton, notwithstanding every remedy which he had tried. At length he
tried a sympathetic remedy: he took an egg, and having boiled it hard
in his own urine, he then with a bodkin perforated the shell in
different parts, and then buried it in an ant-hill. As the ants wasted
the egg he found his strength increase, and he soon was completely
cured. A daughter of a French officer was so tormented by a _paronychia_
(?) for four days together, that the pain kept her from sleeping; by the
order of a medical man she put her finger into a cat's ear, and within
two hours was delivered from her pain. And a councillor's wife was cured
of a _panaritium_ (?) which had vexed her for four days by the same
means. In both cases the cat had received the pain in its ear and
required to be held. The gout is cured by sympathy: by the patient
sleeping with puppies, they take the disease, and the person recovers. A
boy ill with the king's evil could not be cured, his father's dog took
to licking the sores, the dog took the sores, and the boy was completely
cured. A gentleman having a severe pain in the arm was cured by beating
red coral with oak leaves, and applying it to the part affected till
suppuration: a hole was then made in the root of an oak towards the
east, and the mixture put into it and the hole plugged up with a peg of
the same tree, and from that time the pain did altogether cease; and
when afterwards the mixture was removed from the tree, immediately the
torments returned worse than before. Sir Francis Bacon records a cure of
warts: he took a piece of lard with the skin on it, and after rubbing
the warts with it the lard was exposed out of a southern window to
putrify, and the warts wore away as it putrified. Harvey tried to remove
tumours and excrescences by putting the hand of a dead person that had
died of a lingering disease upon them till the part felt cold. In
general the application was effective.
This idea of cure by sympathy retained its hold on the people till this
century, and is not yet entirely gone.
There was another theory, which we may call the magnetic theory. The
philosophy of this theory contended that "The body when diseased
resembled a gun; when loaded, it contains powder and ball, which, by the
mere touch of a little spring, sets the whole machinery of the gun in
motion, whereby the ball is expelled. So also the mere touch or outward
contact of certain bodies or substances has power, like a magnet, to set
in action the machinery of nature by which the disease is
dispelled--sometimes slowly, but often suddenly like the bullet from the
gun. Helmont had a little stone, which, by plunging in oil of almonds,
imbued the oil with such sanative power that it cured almost any
disease. It was sometimes applied inwardly, sometimes outwardly. A
gentleman who had an unwieldy groom procured for him a small fragment of
this stone, and, by licking it with the tip of his tongue every morning,
in three weeks he was reduced in bulk round the waist by a span without
affecting his general health. A gentleman in France who procured a small
fragment of this stone cured several persons of inveterate diseases by
letting them lick it. The stone _Lapis Nephriticus_ bound upon the pulse
of the wrist of the left hand prevents stone, hysterics, and stops the
flux of blood in any part. A compound metal called _electrum_, which is
a mixture of all metals made under certain constellations and shaped
into rings and worn, prevents cramps and palsy, apoplexy, epilepsy, and
severe pains; and in the case of a person in a fit of the falling
sickness, a ring of this metal put on the ring finger is an immediate
cure. A little yarrow and mistletoe put into a bag and worn upon the
stomach, prevents ague and chilblains. A powder made of the common
mistletoe, given in doses of three grains at the full of the moon to
persons troubled with epilepsy, prevents fits; and if given during a fit
it will effect an immediate and permanent cure. A woman with rupture of
the bladder was reported to have been cured by wearing a little bag hung
about her neck containing the powder made from a toad burnt alive in a
new pot. The same prescription was also said to have cured a man of
stone in the bladder."
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