Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/544

530 consists in the practitioner sucking at the afflicted part of the patient till he brings out the thing that has produced the sickness. So long as these things are beans, pumpkin-seeds, and the like—and these are what the doctor generally finds—there is nothing about the matter that passes our comprehension. But when I saw one of these performers, entirely naked except for a little skin-apron, who was closely watched by many curious persons, at last draw out a living snake, a foot and a half long, I was somewhat astonished. It was a real snake, for the by-standers hastened to kill it. If the sick man failed to get well after this kind of procedure, the burning coal was applied to him. Hottentot quacks generally give the patient to drink of a kind of tea which they compound from plants known to them, and which should cause him to vomit. For the cure to succeed they must find the object by which the man was bewitched and made sick, in the vomited matter. These objects are things which can not usually be found in the stomach nor come out of it. Thus my friends were shown, among the things that bad been in this way taken from patients, large pins with glass heads, neatly tied together, crosswise, with a red thread, a piece of wood with several twigs forking from it, and almost as large as the hand, and other things equally curious. So far as I could learn, this process is usually applied to a St. Vitus's dance, which is supposed to be caused by enchantment.

I close with the relation of an incident in which I was made to play the part of the magic doctor, because it exhibits one of the characteristics of the people. A Hottentot came to me with a story of his nephew being bewitched, and said that he had sought me out after several other white men had declined to help him, because they knew nothing about witchcraft. His nephew, he told me, had been quite well till he had been bewitched by a rival in a love-affair, and nothing could now be done with him, for his convulsions and running around. As this condition had come about all of a sudden, the suggestion of some external cause for it was obvious, and I was satisfied that it was a case of poisoning. For the quacks are adepts in the management of snake and plant-poisons, and produce all their enchantments, when they amount to anything, by some means of the kind. I was glad to have the opportunity of dealing with one of these cases by a remedy of my own. I gave the man a bottle of camphor, with directions for using it, and told him to come back and report the result in a fortnight. He came three weeks afterward, with the empty bottle, and told me joyfully that the sick man was well; he had vomited up the lion's hairs in which the enchantment was lodged!—Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from Das Ausland.