Every morning while fasting, the subject is to chew a piece of grass and give it to a jay to eat; when the bird dies, the cure ensues.
In northern Europe the fays, or fairies, were vested with the dreaded power of inflicting disease. Fairies were supposed to be evil spirits which might be propitiated by giving them a gracious appelation.
By giving diseases and other evils a good name when speaking of them, the danger of bringing them upon oneself by his words, is turned away. For this reason, fairies were called Eumenides by the ancients, and "good people" by the Celts.[1]
Morier[2] mentions a general superstition which he found also in Persia that to relieve disease or accident the patient has only to deposit a rag on a certain bush, and from the same spot take another which has been previously left from the same motives by a former sufferer.
There are certain minor ailments which even in the present day, the experienced grandmother thinks herself quite as capable of administering to as the most respected doctor. In olden times children suffering from skin eruptions or from general ill-health were taken to certain ancient dames, who, by means of incantations and exorcism, were able to drive out the devil from the body of the child.
In the small villages of Russia when a child is suffering from a cutaneous disease of the face, it is taken to an "old woman" who mumbles some words and spits several times into the mouth of the child.[3]
Incantations were one of the strongest weapons of defense against all the maladies. A person afflicted with ring worms, for example, takes a little ashes between the forefinger and thumb on three successive mornings, and, before having taken any food, holds the ashes to the part affected and says:
Ringworm, ringworm red. Never may'st thou either spread or speed; But aye grow less and less, And die away among the ase.[4]
After scalding oneself, instead of giving way to vigorous profanity, or counting up to one hundred, as Benjamin Franklin suggested, the custom was to blow upon the injured part and repeat:
There was two angels came from the North,
One brought fire and the other brought frost;
Out fire, in frost.
In the name of Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
There is a fashion even now among the lesser civilized folks to mention the name of a saint or of a divinity, or say something "good" when
