Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/297

Rh scaffold in crowds, cup in hand, ready to quaff the red blood as it flows from the still quivering body."

"Warm blood as a preservative against the usual loathing for water in cases of hydrophobia," is mentioned by a medical correspondent of the third volume of the Transactions of the Moscow Physico-Medical Society (see the Athenæum, 1829, p. 30), and another authority attests that a similar restorative of health is used in China. "Dr. Rennie states," says Mr. Dennys in the Folk-lore of China, p. 67, "and I can myself confirm the assertion, that after an execution at Peking certain large pith-balls are steeped in the blood of the defunct criminal, and under the name of 'blood-bread' are sold as a medicine for consumption. It is only to the blood of decapitated criminals that any such healing power is attributed."

Köhler mentions in his Volksbrauch im Voigtlande, 1S67, p. 418, that a wonder-powder used to be prepared in Voigtland, from the bones of those who had been put to death by the law, which was probably used for magical purposes; and Rochholz asserts that a belief in the efficacy of a draught of human blood is yet firmly fixed in the inner consciousness of the modern European who lives by faith in old tradition. In the seventh decade of the present century human blood, especially that of those who had died by capital punishment, was a well-known remedy for epilepsy in Switzerland. The same author also relates on the authority of Pliny, that the Egyptian kings took baths of human blood to cure elephantiasis, and that the blood of the gladiators who fell in the circus at Rome was drunk to cure the falling-sickness; epilepsy, it would appear, being the disease most favourably influenced by this gruesome antidote, probably from its demoniacal character.

A correspondent of the Intermédiaire, 30 Août, 1895,