Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/782

762 Another effectual remedy, for cancer, is to burn a fresh hound's head to ashes and apply to the wound. Failing relief, human excrement, dried and reduced to dust, may be tried. "If, with this, thou art not able to cure him, thou mayest never do it by any means!"

An excellent remedy for imperfect sight was an ointment of honey mixed with the fatty parts of all manner of river-fishes. Another, equally efficacious, was a compound of dumbledore's honey with the ashes of burned periwinkle. It was, however, requisite that certain mystic words should be uttered while gathering the periwinkle, a wort which had special power to counteract demoniacal possession and devil-sicknesses. The ashes of the elder-tree were applied in cases of palsy, for which a plaster of earth-worms, well pounded, is also accounted excellent.

We may well believe that, for convenience' sake, many of these calcined plants and animals were prepared at leisure and stored, ready for use in cases of emergency. Consequently, though we can hardly flatter ourselves that our ancestors were as exquisite in their neatness as the Japanese, doubtless this little druggist's shop in Osaka gives us a very fair notion of the surroundings of a learned Saxon leech, in whose repositories were earthenware jars of every size, containing the ashes of goat's flesh, of dead bees, of wolf's skull or swine's jaw, of divers shell-fish, of worts and rinds without number—nay, even of human skulls and bones. On the walls hung bunches of dried herbs and remains of birds and lizards, rats, moles, and such small deer, together with skins of serpents, portions of mummies, horns of stags, rhinoceros, narwhal, elephants' tusks, and many other items of the strange materia medica of our own ancestors.

The foregoing "leechdoms" are fair samples of the voluminous pharmacopœia of Britain in the tenth century. But to us, who pride ourselves on the medical skill of the present day, it is truly marvelous to find that the early part of the eighteenth century should show so little, if any, advance on the ignorance which prevailed at the date of the Norman Conquest. Here is a rare old volume which was printed in the Cowgate of Edinburgh in 1712. It is "A Collection of useful Remedies for most Distempers. ... Collected by John Moncrief, the laird of Tippermalluch, a person of extraordinary skill and knowledge in the art of physick, and who performed many stupendous cures by these simple remedies."

His volume contains innumerable directions for the preparation of divers herbs, and also a multitude of prescriptions of animal substances so inexpressibly loathsome as to make it a matter of marvel how any one could be found either to prepare them, or to submit to their application. Salts of ammonia in the crudest form were a favorite remedy for external or internal use.

By far the least objectionable compounds were those prepared from carbonized animals in the Japanese or early Saxon manner. Thus