Page:Leechdoms wortcunning and starcraft of early England volume 1.djvu/26

 head ache, bleared eyes, dim sight, pearl, excrescences in the eyes, tooth ache, rheumatism, quartan fevers, gout, spasms, lumbago, sterility, ghosts and nightmares, phrenzy, family discord, indifference to wives, epilepsy, snakes, shiverings, darts, barking of dogs, fascination, gripes, gravel, childbirth, magic arts, mad dogs, dysentery, poison, tyranny, effeminacy, and a potent love charm, a Lasses come follow me, from the hyena: but he must be caught when the moon is in Gemini.

The Magi had a special admiration for the mole, if any one swallowed its heart palpitating and fresh, he would become at once an expert in divination. The heart of a hen, placed upon a womans left breast while she is asleep, will make her tell all her secrets. This the Roman calls a portentous lie. Perhaps he had tried it. They were the authors of the search for red or white stones in the brood nestlings of swallows, mentioned by our Saxons. A crazy fellow (lymphatus) would recover his senses if sprinkled with the blood of a mole: and those troubled with nocturnal spirits and by Fauns would be relieved if smeared with a dragon's tongue, eyes, gall, and intestines boiled down in wine and oil. Bulls dung was good for dropsical men, cows dung for women.

The Magi also taught to drink the ashes of a pigs pizzle in sweet wine, and so to make water into a dogs kennel, adding the words "lest he, like a hound, should make urine in his own bed." If a man in the morning made water a little on his own foot it would be a preservative against mala medicamenta, doses meant to do him harm. For quartan fevers they catch with the left hand the beetle that has