Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/234

230 in the other, but that they all depend upon that principle which is common to them all—the principle of suggestion.

The strange, the mysterious and the weird have great suggestive potency, and hence drugs culled at unearthly hours, during unusual conjunctions of the moon and planets, on St. John's or St. Agnes' Eve, have unusual curative properties. The rare stone bezoar, or bezar—a concretion found in the intestines of certain animals like goats—was believed in colonial New England to have magical powers. Any mysterious rite may be efficacious if linked with a vague but strong superstitious belief. In 1884, two children in Suffolk, England, between Needham and Barking, were reported cured of infantile hernia by means of the cleft-ash rite. The procedure was as follows: A sapling was split upward, beginning a few feet from the ground and tied at the top to prevent the cleft from extending all the way up. The cleft was held open and the child passed through three times, head downward, each time by a different person. The sapling was then bound up securely at short intervals. It grew together again—which was supposed to be the reason why the children recovered.

Miracles are sometimes due to the reinforcement of suggestion by the fascinatingly horrible, and hence the curative property of things associated with corpses, skulls, gallows, graveyards and so on. One of the many remedies for ague in England is to wear chips from a gallows around one's neck; for a wen one should go alone at night to the spot where a fresh corpse lies—preferably that of an executed criminal—and pass its hand over the wen. A poor woman living in the neighborhoolneighborhood [sic] of Hartlepool, England, some years ago was induced by a "wise woman" to go alone at night to an outhouse where a suicide lay awaiting the coroner's inquest and to hold the hand of the corpse on her wen all night. She died shortly after from mental shock. Another woman at Cuddesden, Oxfordshire, asked for the hand of a corpse in order to cure a goiter. Her father, she said, had been cured by the same means, the swelling having diminished as the hand mouldered away. In 1850, it was common for numbers of invalids in certain parts of England to congregate round the gallows in order to receive the "death stroke"—the touch of an executed criminal's hand. The practise declined because of the high fees the hangmen came to charge for applying the remedy.

There was a time when powdered mummy was a highly valued medicine throughout Europe. Carbonized and powdered animals are still used in China and Japan, as crushed bones once were in England. The celebrated chemist, Eobert Boyle, relates, in his essay on "The Porousness of Animal Bodies," how, "having been one summer frequently subject to bleed at the nose and reduced to employ several remedies to check the distemper, that which I found the most effectual to staunch the blood