Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/97

Rh given unasked and received without thanks from one of the opposite sex will sometimes stop epistaxis.

We see that a bone taken out from a carp's bead stauncheth blood, and so will none other part of the fish.

Poisoning had and still has its superstitious treatment. The unicorn's horn was remedy for all poisons. The horn of a unicorn (the animal is not to be found classified in the modern books on zoology) was worth the price of half a city. It is needless to say that this remedy was not within the reach of everybody, and less poetic remedies were used by the ordinary people. The quacks, however, made huge profits selling powdered unicorn's horn to the gullible public. It is more than a suspicion that the stuff sold was made from the horns of an ox or a ram. "Plain proof declares one poison to drive out another." and they certainly gave dangerous medications to persons that were poisoned. If the patient did not succumb to the original draught, he had very good chances of dying as a result of the remedy.

For the bites of animals, many queer remedies were in vogue. A patient bitten by a dog used to eat the hair of this dog. A person stung by an adder was advised to kill the animal and apply some of its fat to the wound, or else to fry the adder and strike the place bitten with the hot flesh, or else to make an ointment from its liver and apply it locally (Noake).

 'Tis true a scorpion's oil is said To cure the wounds the vermin made.

The Boston Journal of Chemistry (1879) tells of a druggist from Texas who paid two hundred and fifty dollars for a "mad-stone" which had the powers to cure the bites of animals. A custom, which is practised by the Hottentots also, is to kill a chicken and to thrust the bitten part into the stomach of the bird, and there let it remain till the chicken becomes cold. If the flesh of the fowl becomes dark, a cure was supposed to have been affected; if not the poison had been absorbed by the person bitten.

To relieve deafness, they applied eels to the ears. For the cure of dropsy "all-flower water" was recommended. Another method for the treatment of dropsy is the one reported by Joubert:

For the cure of rickets, they suggested sleeping on a bed of green bracken, or passing the child nine times through a holed stone against the sun. In Oxfordshire, they relieved heartache by giving the patient the last nine drops of tea from the tea-pot after the guests had been served.