Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/288

278 other foreign substances, having got inside the body of the patient. Accordingly, the malady is to be cured by the medicine-man extracting the hurtful things, usually by sucking the affected part till they come out. Mr. Backhouse describes the proceedings of a native doctress in South Africa, which will serve as a typical case. A man was taken ill with a pain in his side, and a Fingo witch was sent for. As she was quite naked, except a rope round her waist, the missionary who lived in the place declined to assist at the ceremony himself, but sent his wife. The doctress sucked at the man's side, and produced some grains of Indian corn, which she said she had drawn from inside him, and which had caused the disease. The missionary's wife looked in her mouth, and there was nothing there; but when she sucked again and again, there came more grains of corn. At last a piece of tobacco-leaf made its appearance with the corn, and showed how the trick was done. The woman swallowed the tobacco first to produce nausea, and then a quantity of Indian corn, and by the help of the rope round her waist, she was able so to control her stomach as only to produce a few grains at a time. In North and South America, in Borneo, and in Australia, the same cure is part of the doctor's work, with the difference only that bones, bits of wood, stones, lizards, fragments of knife-blades, balls of hair, and other miscellaneous articles are produced, and that the tricks by which he keeps up the pretence of sucking them out are perhaps seldom so clever as the African one. In Australia the business is profitably worked by one sorcerer charming bits of quartz into the victim's body, so that another has to be sent for to get them out. It has been already mentioned that in the North of Ireland the wizards still extract elf-bolts, that is, stone arrow-heads, from the bodies of bewitched cattle. Southey, who knew a great deal about savages, goes so far as to say of this cure by sucking out extraneous objects, as practised by the native sorcerers of Brazil, that "their mode of quackery was