Folk healing of the past often included gruesome ingredients and practices
By Richard Holland
RUMMAGING through ‘Bye-gones’, a newspaper column which flourished between 1871 and the Great War, I found many examples of folk medicine practiced in Wales and the Welsh Border counties.
A Wrexham correspondent stated: ‘I remember the wife of Billy the Watchman roasting a mouse with breadcrumbs and giving it to their boy as a cure for wetting the bed.’ It’s hard to understand why a roast mouse should be seen as effecting such a cure, unless the threat of such nasty ‘medicine’ kept the boy awake at night! It certainly doesn’t tally with the medieval ‘doctrine of signatures’ philosophy which found its way so often into folk remedies.
The same writer added that a Wrexham carriage driver, Ned Edwards, was well-known for his own prescription to ward off tuberculosis, a common killer in his day. Every morning Ned would forage for as many snails as he could find and these he would promptly swallow ‘all alive and kicking’, as he put it. For some reason, only white-shelled snails would do. Why Ned had such faith in this preventative is a mystery but it is intriguing to learn that he never did catch tuberculosis and lived to a ripe old age.
Snails were also used as wart-removers. They would be gathered at dawn and then rubbed on each of wart in turn. The unfortunate creatures would then be pinned on the thorns of hawthorn bushes and left them to die. It was believed that as they rotted away, so, too, would the warts. Warts must have been a considerable problem for our ancestors for the various bizarre and magical means employed to get rid of them would fill an article of their own.
Spiders, too, suffered in the cause of country medicine. A muslin bag full of wriggling spiders hung around the neck was used to cure whooping cough. It was thought that as the spiders died, so would the disease. This idea that diseases could be transferred to other living creatures would seem to hark back to primitive sacrificial magic. In Wales it was believed that anyone who had eaten the flesh of an eagle would be able to cure shingles (called eryri, or ‘eagles’ in Welsh) by spreading their saliva on the rash. Similarly, a person who had eaten the flesh of a crow could cure croup, presumably because this disease made one croak like a crow. These superstitions existed well into the 20th century.
Holy ground was not exempt from these superstitions; quite the contrary. Grass from the churchyard was believed to cure rabies and grease wiped from the church bells (called ‘bell breech’) was considered sovereign in clearing up ringworm, piles and an alarming condition called ‘wild warts’.
Perhaps the most extreme of all these beliefs was that even death could be employed to enhance life. Moss which had grown on a skull in a graveyard was said to ease headaches if dried, powdered and taken like snuff. The hand of a dead man, especially a suicide, was supposed to be able to remove tumours and other swellings if stroked across the offending part. A spoonful of earth from the grave of a recently interred virgin dissolved in water was said to cure tuberculosis. The earth on a grave had a number of uses. To get rid of boils one had to walk around the fresh grave of a person of the opposite sex six times then crawl across it three times.
A certain amount of ritual seems to have added to the supposed effect of some of these remedies. Studies by anthropologists have shown that elaborate ritual can lead to a state of mind in which the subconscious can perform many surprising things, including healing. In our society, hypnotism can produce a similar effect, and the power of a placebo, a sugar pill containing no medicine but resulting in a cure nonetheless, is well-known. It is possible, therefore, that if a patient really believes that even the most unlikely ingredient or practice will cure him, it might do so. This would be one reason why so many folk remedies continued to be used for so long.
[Sources: Various, including volumes of ‘Bye-gones', a Victorian/Edwardian journal published in Oswestry, Shropshire.]
© Richard Holland 2008
