The patient was taken to running water, where seven rushes were picked and were laid across the affected part; the rushes were then thrown into the stream. This was repeated on three consecutive days. "Cataplasme de chair de vautour avec les vifs" was applied locally to hareskin disease.[1] Si poter foureure et plumes de Vautour sur L'estomac luy pent servir en quelque chose?[2]
Procreative disease was, of course, more inviting to quack remedies than any other ailment of any other part of the body. The richest quacks and those that do the most flourishing business, are those charlatans who pretend to cure the sexual illnesses. I shall not discuss the remedies for all genital disorders. Sterility, however, presents very interesting points, and I shall just briefly give some of the ancient customs that were common for the treatment of this "deficiency." In all countries, nulliparous women traveled to holy places and prayed in the churches of the holy saints to grant them issue. At Jarrow, in England, brides sit themselves in the chair of the Venerable Bede. The old English dramatist, Heywood,[3] relates of the traveling to holy shrines of sterile women in order to become fruitful.
Another miracle eke I shall you say
Of a woman which that many a day
Had been wedded, and in all that season
She had no child, neither daughter nor son,
Wherefore to St. Modwyn she went on a pilgrimage,
And offered there a live pig, as is the usage
Of the wives that in London dwell.
In Egypt and other semi-civilized countries, the women who desire to become pregnant, pass several times silently under the corpses that hang on the gallows, or else they bathe in the dirtiest puddles where carrions and carcasses of dead animals abound.
Juvenal[4] says in one of his satires:
Steriles moriuntur, et illis Turgida non prodest condita pyxide Lyde.
Another Latin writer states:
Credebant antiqui mulierem sterilem concipere posse, si pyxide araneam inclusam gestit in sinu.
Sage and salts were the ordinary ingredients of the prescriptions which were given to women in order to cause them to become enceinte. On the other hand.
Gold dust is taken internally when to prevent offspring is desirable. Shot is swallowed with the same intention, and also scrapings from a rhinoceros horn.[5]
A little superstition seems to be a universal trait, but it is the excess of it which has caused so much harm and misery.
