Note 110 — Chapter V
Reading edition
Our readers will remember the use that Longfellow makes of this fancy in his “Evangeline:”—
“Only beware of the fever, my friends! Beware of the fever! For it is not like that of our cold Acadian climate, Cured by wearing a spider hung round one’s neck in a nutshell.”
In the diary of Elias Ashmole we find that on May 11th, 1651, he was suffering from ague. He writes: “I took early in the morning a good dose of elixir, and hung three spiders about my neck, ague away, Deo Gratias!” Sometimes a pill made up of spider web is taken, and in some parts of the south of England a favourite remedy for jaundice was the living spider itself rolled up with butter into a pill.