APPENDIX (continued 3)

I am not aware whether the Lamas of Peking have there introduced the fashion of administering medicine from a drinking-cup fashioned from the upper part of a wise man’s skull, but such medicine-cups are greatly esteemed in Thibet and Mongolia, where they are mounted in gold, silver, or copper.

Such details as all these are apt to sound to us somewhat as far-fetched travellers’ tales, but it is certainly startling to realise how exactly they describe the medicine-lore of our own ancestors, of which traces survive amongst us even to this day. We know of several cases within recent years when in the north of Scotland the skull of a suicide was with great difficulty procured, and used as a drinking-cup for an epileptic patient. Still surer was it deemed to reduce part of the skull to powder and swallow it. Even the moss which grew on such skulls was deemed a certain cure for divers diseases. In the official prescription of the London College of Physicians, A.D. 1678, the skull of a man who has died violent death, and the horn of a unicorn, appear as highly approved medicines. In 1724 all human skulls are declared useful, and multitudes were exported from Ireland to Germany for the manufacture of a famous ointment.

Equally precious to the British leech of the last century were the ashes of a burnt witch collected from her funeral-pyre. Such were deemed a certain cure for gout or for fever, and eagerly were they gathered up and treasured.

But just as the Chinese doctor sets most store by the animals imported from foreign lands, so did our ancestors chiefly prize a preparation of long-deceased Egyptians, or, as they were described among the standard medicines quoted in the medical books of Nuremberg only two hundred years ago, “The embalmed bodies of man’s flesh, called mumia, which 473have been embalmed with costly salves and balsams, and smell strongly of myrrh, aloes, and other fragrant things.”

The learned doctors of France, Germany, Italy, and Britain all made great use of mummy, which was pronounced to be an infallible remedy for many diseases. And so great was the demand for this ingredient, as to lead to the establishment in Alexandria of a secret factory for converting all manner of dead bodies into such profitable articles of trade.

The apothecaries of England found an economical substitute in the bones of ancient Britons. Thus Dr. Toope of Oxford, writing in 1685, tells how, at the circles on Hakpen Hill, in Wiltshire, he had discovered a rare lot of human bones—skeletons—arranged in circles, with the feet towards the centre. He says, “The bones were large and nearly rotten, but the teeth extream and wonderfully white.” Undisturbed by any qualms of reverence for the ancestors of his race, he adds: “I dug up many bushells with which I made a noble medicine!”

In truth, the human form divine received small veneration from the philosophers of those days, when the bait most highly recommended for the luring of fish was a compound of man’s fat, cat’s fat, heron’s fat, powdered mummy, assafœtida, and various oils. In The Angler’s Vade Mecum, published in 1681, it is stated that man’s fat for this purpose could readily be obtained from the London chirurgeons concerned in anatomy!

Referring to the little shops of the old Japanese apothecaries; the most remarkable point of similarity between these and those of early English druggists is suggested by the extensive use of calcined animal-matter, recommended in the prescriptions which were most highly valued in England before the Norman Conquest, and which are recorded in the elaborate Saxon manuscripts, carefully preserved in our national archives.

These “Leechdoms” are written in ancient black-letter characters, and are curiously illustrated with pictures of the herbs and animals which are recommended for medicinal use. From these it appears that upwards of eight hundred years ago the Saxon hairdressers prevented the hair from falling by applying a wash of dead bees burnt to ashes, and seethed in oil with leaves of willow; but should hair be too thick, then must a swallow be burnt to ashes, and these be sprinkled on the hair.

Wood ashes seethed in resin, or goat’s flesh or goat’s horn burnt to ashes and “smudged on with water,” are recommended for any hard swelling. For pain in the jowl, burn a swallow to dust, and mingle him with field-bees’ honey, and give the man to eat frequently. For erysipelas, failing a plaister of earthworms, take a swallow’s nest and burn it, with its dung, rub it to dust, mingle with vinegar, and smear therewith.

But, in truth, all animals were turned to good account in these Saxon 474leechdoms, and the wolf seems to have been as highly esteemed as is the tiger in Japan—a wolf’s head under the pillow was a pleasant cure for sleeplessness, and the skull of a wolf, when burnt thoroughly and finely powdered, would heal racking pains in the joints. An ointment made from the right eye of a wolf was the best prescription the Saxon oculist could command.

The bite of a mad dog might be cured by laying on the ashes of a swine’s jaw; while the head of a mad dog, burnt to ashes and spread on the sore, was a cure for cancer. The ashes of the elder-tree were applied in cases of palsy, and imperfect sight was improved by an ointment of honey mixed with the ashes of burnt periwinkles, always provided that certain mystic words were uttered while gathering this plant (a wort which had special power to counteract demoniacal possession).

Such “Leechdoms” as these were all very well in the tenth and eleventh centuries; but it certainly is startling to find how little, if any, advance medical science had made by the early part of the eighteenth century, when the medical works most in repute contain numerous 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 favourite remedy for external or internal use.^[89]

By far the least objectionable compounds were those prepared from carbonised animals in the Japanese or early Saxon manner. We find the ashes of burnt swallows and of their nests still in high favour for the cure of dangerous sore-throats, and among the remedies for beautifying the hair are enumerated, “burnt ashes of little froggs,” “ashes of bees mixt with oyl,” ashes of goat’s dung, goat’s hoof, and cow’s dung, as also the blood of a shell-crab. But a preparation of the burnt ashes of swan’s bones, and the blood of a bat or a little frog, with the milk of a bitch, is effectual for preventing the growth of hair.

For the disease called lethargie, the whole skin of a hare must be burnt, also “the smoak of kid’s leather burnt, holden to the nose.” The burnt hairs of the hare cures erysipelas, ashes of a hare burnt whole, with ashes of burnt willow or ashes of the bark of the elm-tree cureth scalding. The burnt hoofs of a cow or ankle-bones of a swine are the cure for colic. For cancer, nothing better has been discovered than the ashes of a dog’s head, or burnt human dung. As a valuable styptic to staunch bleeding of the nose, burn the blood of the patient and snuff up the powder thereof. Ashes of hen’s feathers burnt, and ashes of nettles are also 475beneficial. So likewise were spiders pulverised, or a dried toad worn round the neck. “Ashes of a burnt frog gleweth veins and arteries and cures burning.”

The merit of these simple remedies was greatly enhanced by the use of fine Latin names. Thus the most powerful known remedy in the treatment of smallpox and dropsy, both for internal and external use, was a preparation of powdered toad, administered under the name of Pulvis Æthiopicus. In fact, the more nonsensical the remedy, the more need was there for a high-sounding name!

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) there is no doubt that the little druggist shops in Osaka gave us a very fair notion of the surroundings, not only of an ancient Saxon leech, but of the learned, Latin-quoting doctors of the last century, in whose magician-like laboratories were stored 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 another item of the strange materia medica of our own ancestors.

Nor need we at the beginning of the twentieth century (with all the amazing progress made by medical science in the last fifty years) pretend to have altogether extinguished faith in the old superlatively nasty remedies. Certainly the simple ingredients are now generally so refined as to be unrecognisable. Who that inhales the fragrance of eau de mille fleurs remembers that its principal ingredient is the drainage of the cow-byre? or that the brilliant, transparent gelatine which enfolds our bonbons is made from the sweepings of the slaughter-house?

But what I allude to is the survival of the old specifics as popular folk-medicine, in use to this day among the peasantry in various districts of Great Britain. The catalogue is almost endless, including divers methods of applying black snails, eels’ blood, the hand of a dead child or of a suicide, living spiders, hairy caterpillars, and other strange remedies. For instance, there are places in England where the country people still believe that the best specific for all complaints of the human eye is to burn the flesh of a swallow and apply the ashes to the part affected. The Japanese, who carefully prepared his dried frogs, toads, and lizards, may learn with interest that the approved treatment for scrofula at the present day in Devonshire is to dry the hind leg of a toad and wear it round the neck in a silken bag, while for rheumatism the toad must be burnt to ashes, and its dust, wrapped in silk, is to be worn round the 476throat. Both in Cornwall and Northampton poor toads are still made to do duty for the cure of nose-bleeding and quinsy, while in various parts of England “toad-powder,” or even a live toad or spider shut up in a box, is accounted a charm against contagion.

Frogs are well-nigh as valuable as toads to the sick poor. In Aberdeenshire it is accounted a sure cure for sore eyes to lick the bright eyes of a live frog, while the peasants of Donegal find wondrous comfort in rubbing rheumatic limbs with dissolved frog’s spawn. It is also believed in Ireland that the tongue which has licked a lizard all over will thenceforth be endowed with a wondrous gift of healing whatsoever it touches.

But it is when we come to the mystic serpent that we find the most startling connection between the folk-medicine-lore of Britain and Japan. Considering what insignificant little creatures are our British snakes, it certainly is strange that they should be quite as highly esteemed as are the great python-skins in the Chinese school of medicine, wherein the skin of a white spotted snake is valued as the most efficacious remedy for palsy, leprosy, and rheumatism.

Strange to say, in our old Gaelic legends there is a certain white snake which receives unbounded reverence as the king of snakes; and another legend tells of a nest containing six brown adders and one pure white one, which latter, if it can be caught and boiled, confers wondrous medical skill on the lucky man who tastes of the serpent broth.^[90]

In some of the Hebridean Isles, notably that of Lewis, the greatest faith prevails in the efficacy of water in which a so-called serpent-stone has been dipped. Should such a charmed stone be unobtainable, the head of an adder may be tied to a string and dipped in the water with equally good result.

In Devonshire any person bitten by a viper is advised at once to kill the creature, and rub the wound with its fat. I am told that this practice has survived in some of the Northern States of America, where the flesh of a rattlesnake, and especially its oil, are accounted the best cures for its own bite. Some of the sturdy New Englanders even wear a snake-skin round their neck, from a firm faith in its power of curing rheumatism, a faith certainly carried by their fathers from Britain, where the same remedy is still sometimes applied.

It is not many years since an old man used to sit on the steps of King’s College Chapel, at Cambridge, and earn his living by exhibiting common English snakes, and selling their cast-off sloughs to be bound round the forehead and temples of persons suffering from headache—a valuable remedy for overworked students!

In Durham an eel’s skin, worn as a garter round the naked leg, is considered a preventive of cramp, while in Northumberland it is esteemed the best bandage for a sprained limb.

477So, too, in Sussex, the approved cure for a swollen neck is to draw a snake nine times across the throat of the sufferer, after which operation the snake is killed, and its skin is sewn in a piece of silk and worn round the patient’s neck. Sometimes the snake is put in a bottle, which is tightly corked and buried in the ground, and it is expected that as the victim decays the swelling will subside.

This, however, relates to a different class of subject to that which has led me into this long digression—namely the little drug-stores at Osaka, with all their curious contents. I can only hope that, should these pages ever meet the eye of my Japanese friend, he will acknowledge that my interest in the medicine-lore of his ancestors was certainly justifiable.

Note L Magazine Articles

My first experience of writing a magazine article was in 1869, when I sent a sketch of our “Camp Life in the Himalayas” to Dr. Norman Macleod, who promptly inserted it in Good Words.

In subsequent years I contributed many papers to a great variety of periodicals and newspapers, chiefly on topics which afterwards found a place in my books of travel, such as one on “Oiling the Waves,” which appeared in the Nineteenth Century for April 1882, and contained much information gleaned from many sea-captains, seamen, and fishers on the practical value of a very small amount of oil in preventing waves from breaking in white crests, and so swamping vessels. So many cases were quoted of ships which were undoubtedly saved by this simple safeguard, that Lord Cottesloe called the attention of the House of Lords to the paper, with the result that some small experiment by a lifeboat was ordered, but the result was nil. The principal evidence on the subject was reproduced in my book, In the Hebrides.

Of other oily papers I may mention one on “The World’s Oil Supply,” which appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine in September 1884, and some papers on “Washing Made Easy,” which told how some ingenious women in New Zealand had discovered that by adding a little paraffin to the water in which they were boiling their dirty linen all the dirt separated, and scarcely involved any further trouble.

I was told that those papers attracted much attention; and it was interesting to note how many new soaps straightway came into existence, and have ever since been enormously advertised. But only one of them gave any clue to the simple new ingredient to which they owe their success, and of that one I have never seen a single advertisement, therefore I have real pleasure in confiding to all my readers that it is called “Evelyn’s Paraffin Soap,” made by Messrs. Ogston and Sons, soap-makers, Aberdeen, and I consider it the best of any I know. (Of course 478it will be said that this is an advertisement, but it is simply the statement of a fact.)

In looking over a list of the subjects about which I wrote, not connected with any of my books, I see that NOW they would be quite commonplace; but they were by no means so at the time they were written—as, for instance, my paper on cremation in the Contemporary Review for June 1883, “De Mortuis.”

So also in regard to a paper on “The Leper Hospitals of Britain,” which appeared in The Gentleman’s Magazine, September 1884. The subject was then so old as to be practically new to the current generation, so of course it was pleasant to have been the one to disinter it. Rather a curious thing occurred with regard to its publication. I had offered it to one of the principal periodicals, which detained it for so many months that I was satisfied that it had been accepted, and so I abstained from asking troublesome questions. At length, however, I ventured to do so, and my paper was at once returned to me, and at the same time I observed that an article on the same subject was advertised for the next number of the magazine in question. I at once despatched mine to The Gentleman’s Magazine, and by the exceeding courtesy of Messrs. Chatto and Windus (who at the very last moment managed to postpone an article and insert mine), it was launched on the same day as its rival. The similarity of the two was remarkable, all quotations being identical.

A paper of specially curious interest, and for which I collected a great number of very telling illustrations from ancient sculptures and from modern life in many countries, was one to prove the evolution of the tall pagoda from the original honorific umbrellas carried in procession before or after a great man, not for use, but as a badge of rank. At last, as in Burmah, seven or nine came to be placed above one another, and so doubtless led to these silken umbrellas being reproduced in stone erections of five, seven, nine, or even thirteen stories in height. This paper, which I called “Umbrellas, Aurioles, and Pagodas,” was published in the June and July numbers of the English Illustrated Magazine for 1888, and was very well received by the world which cares about such matters.

Of some interest also were such papers as—

Some Eventful Voyages. Blackwood’s Magazine, March 1890.

Wolves and Were-Wolves. Temple Bar, November 1890.

Unfathomed Mysteries. (Spiritualism at Boston.) Blackwood’s Magazine, May 1883.

Musical Instruments and their Homes. Blackwood’s Magazine, April 1891.

Professions for Dogs. Blackwood’s Magazine, November 1888.

Strange Medicines. Nineteenth Century, June 1887.

The Locust War in Cyprus. Nineteenth Century, August 1883.

479Locusts and Farmers of America. Nineteenth Century, January 1885.

The World’s Wonderlands. (In Wyoming and New Zealand.) Overland Monthly, January 1885.

In the Old Muniment Room of Wollaton Hall. New Review, October and December 1889.

Our Oldest Colony, Bombay. Macmillan’s Magazine, January 1887.

Sunny Days in Malta. National Review, September 1886.

Of Furred and Feathered Foes. (New Zealand.) Gentleman’s Magazine, May 1882.

Revered Footprints. (Held sacred.) Time, July 1886.

Footprints of Old. (Fossil and other.) Sun, March 1891.

Prophecies by a Highland Seer. (Very remarkable facts in Ross-shire.) Belgravia, September 1884.

A Legend of Inverawe and Ticonderoga. Atlantic Monthly, September 1884.

A Night of Horror at a Highland Castle. Belgravia, October 1886.

Two British Pilgrimages in the Nineteenth Century (to Iona and Lindisfarne). Cornhill Magazine, August 1883.

Striking “Ile.” (Petroleum springs.) Atalanta, July 1889.

Earth’s Fiery Fountains of Molten Rock. Atalanta.

Earth’s Boiling Fountains. Atalanta, February and March 1888.

A Fiery Flood in Pennsylvania. Atalanta, August 1892.

Divining Rods, Ancient and Modern. Quiver, July 1887.

The Postmen of the World. Cassell’s Family Magazine, July and August 1885.

The Newspapers of the World. Cassell’s Family Magazine, August 1884.

On Cuttle-fish as a Dainty Dish. Cassell’s Family Magazine, July 1883.

On the Social Position of Divers Animals. Cassell’s Family Magazine, May 1887.

Alligator-Farming. Cassell’s Family Magazine, June 1883.

Destruction of the American Bison. Good Words, June 1884.

How Mother Earth Rocked her Cradle. (In Japan.) Newberry House Magazine, July and August 1892.

Real Estate in Volcanic Regions. (Japan.) Cornhill Magazine, February 1890.

Volcanic Frolics. Monthly Packet, September 1886.

The Eruption of Mount Tarawera. (Destruction of the Pink and White Terraces, New Zealand.) Leisure Hour, October 1886.

480The Ending of the Carnival. (On the Riviera.) Leisure Hour, May 1887.

Earthquakes in Divers Places. Leisure Hour, June 1887.

The Great Yellow River Inundation. Leisure Hour, March 1886.

The Home of the Blizzard. Leisure Hour, April 1888.

Our Borrowed Plumes. (Fine feathers make fine birds in many lands.) Leisure Hour, August 1883.

The Hot Lakes of New Zealand. Sunday at Home, October and November 1886.

Etc. Etc. Etc.

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