Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/294

 EXECUTED CRIMINALS AND FOLK-MEDICINE.

BY MABEL PEACOCK.

In Mr. W. Wollaston Groome's article on Suffolk Leech-craft, published in Folk-Lore, June, 1895, he tells his readers that wens or fleshy excrescences are treated by passing the hand of a dead man over the part affected, on three successive days. To work a perfect cure, the invalid ought to visit the corpse unaccompanied, and place one of its lifeless hands on the morbid growth.

Further northward, in Lincolnshire, two similar ideas are to be met with among the remedies unrecognised by medical science. A piece of the rope with which a criminal has been hanged is good against epilepsy. And wens and goitrous swellings may be cured by passing a dead man's hand seven times, or nine times, across them; the dead man being, if possible, an evil-doer who has suffered death at the hands of justice, or a person who has died by drowning.

The Stamford Mercury, March 26, 1830, p. 3, recounts that the execution of three men at Lincoln, who had been condemned at the late assizes, drew an immense concourse of people, and that two women came forward to rub the dead men's hands over some wens or diseased parts of their bodies, one of them bringing a child with her for the same purpose. The Sporting Magazine, vol. i., p. 295 (1793), also bears testimony with regard to a similar scene which happened at Newgate when a man named Hubbard was one of the delinquents who suffered. After the bodies were suspended, a child was brought beneath the gallows, to which the convulsed hand of Hubbard was applied, under the idea of its curing a wen. "On execution days at Northampton," says a correspondent of Notes and Queries, writing in