cures snake-bite; red flannel, looking like blood, is supposed to cure blood-taints, and therefore rheumatism; bear's grease, being taken from an animal thickly covered with hair, is recommended to persons fearing baldness.[1]
Still another injury was wrought by this theological pseudoscience. One of the ideas it evolved was that of disgusting the demon with the body which he tormented: hence the patient was made to swallow or apply to himself various unspeakable ordures, with such medicines as the livers of toads, the blood of frogs and rats, fibers of the hangman's rope, and ointment made from the body of gibbeted criminals. Many of these were survivals of heathen superstitions, but theologic reasoning wrought into them an orthodox significance. As an example of this mixture of heathen with Christian magic, we may cite the following from a mediæval medical book as a salve against "nocturnal goblin visitors": "Take hop plant, wormwood, bishopwort, lupine, ash-throat, henbane, harewort, viper's bugloss, heathberry plant, cropleek, garlic, grains of hedgerife, githrife, and fennel. Put these worts into a vessel, set them under the altar, sing over them nine masses, boil them in butter and sheep's grease, add much holy salt, strain through a cloth, throw the worts into running water. If any ill tempting occur to a man, or an elf or goblin night visitors come, smear his body with this salve, and put it on his eyes, and cense him with incense, and sign him frequently with the sign of the cross. His condition will soon be better."[2]
As to surgery, this same amalgamation of theology with survivals of pagan beliefs continued to check the evolution of medical science down to the modern epoch. The nominal hostility of the Church to the shedding of blood withdrew, as we have seen, from surgical practice the great body of her educated men; hence surgery remained down to the fifteenth century a despised profession, its practice continued largely in the hands of charlatans, and down to a very recent period the name "barber-surgeon" was a survival of this. In such surgery, the application of various
- ↑ For a summary of the superstitions which arose under the theological doctrine of signatures, see Dr. Eccles's admirable little tract on the Evolution of Medical Science, p. 140. See also Scoffern, Science and Folk Lore, p. 76.
- ↑ For a list of unmentionable ordures used in Germany near the end of the seventeenth century, see Lammert, Volksmedizin und medizinischer Aberglaube in Bayera, Würzburg, 1869, p. 34, note. For the English prescription given, see Cockayne, Leechdoms, Wortcuring, and Starcraft of Early England, in the Master of the Rolls series, London, 1865, vol. ii, pp. 345 and following. Still another of these prescriptions given by Cockayne covers three or four octavo pages. For very full details of this sort of sacred pseudo-science in Germany, with accounts of survivals of it at the present time, see Wuttke, Prof, der Theologie in Halle, Der Deutsche Volksaberglaube der Gegenwart, Berlin, 1869, passim. For France, see Rambaud, pp. 371 et seq.
