Still another plan may be tried to ease the little sufferers. If they be passed nine times under the belly and over the back of either a piebald pony or an ass (the latter preferred), the cough will be immediately charmed away, whilst a touch on the larynx from the hand of a seventh son of a seventh son is held to be a certain cure. And a hairy caterpillar or small wood-lizard tied round the child’s neck, having been stitched in a small bag, was, and I believe is yet, looked upon as a sovereign remedy.
Snail soup is drunk even to-day for the cure of consumption. And the skin of an eel (if skinned when alive), placed in a silken bag and worn so as to rest on the chest, is believed to cut phlegm when nothing else will.
To cure the ‘water-springs,’ an old name for acidity or heartburn, old people tell me the following is an infallible cure if taken in time—a very wise proviso—burnt oyster, cockle, and mussel shells ground to powder, equal parts, and mixed in worm-water. This latter was prepared by gathering a handful of worms from the churchyard and boiling them. The burnt shells might do good; ordinary water and chalk would have been equally efficacious, had they but known it.
But nearly every disease or complaint had its cure in days past, and, in a more or less degree, all were nasty.
For the moment let us return to wart-charmers. There is room here for both speculation and research. They did cure warts, of that there is not the least shadow of a doubt. The amount of evidence on record is such that contradiction and disbelief amounts to crass folly, and shows an ignorance of well-authenticated facts. A man I know, whose hand was covered with warts—warts which simply jeered at caustic and all such applications—at last went to the charmer. What did the man do? He simply asked the old chap if he believed he could remove them. Having answered in the affirmative, the charmer just rubbed his hand over the whole lot, muttered some words, and told the warty one to go home—in a fortnight’s time he was wartless. Hundreds of cases could be given. Absolute faith that they would disappear, may have exercised some mental action over the physical, and the trick was done. In this way, if we admit some hypnotic power which they unconsciously used, we may account for many of the wonders which these charmers and wise men worked in days past, often bringing about results at which possibly no one was more surprised than the wise men themselves; but they, like many of to-day, had the sense to hold their peace, and that has often dressed many a conjuring trick with all trappings of philosophy.