Note 143.1 — Chapter X · WITCHCRAFT: PHILTRES—PREVENTIVE AND REMEDIAL LEECHCRAFT.

The principle has many other applications. A remedy for fever in use in the sixteenth century in the Mark of Brandenburg was to cut the patient’s nails, bind them on the back of a crawfish, and throw the crustacean back into flowing water.143.1 In France, and, it seems, in England also, the remedy recorded a century later for the quartan ague was to wrap the nail-parings in a portion of a shroud, and fasten the package around the neck of an eel, which was then returned to the water.144.1 In these cases it can hardly be doubted that the sufferer was to benefit by the cooling influence of the water. In the north-east of Scotland it was usual to put the nail-parings of a consumptive patient into a rag from his clothes, the rag was waved thrice round his head, the operator crying “Deas Soil,” and then buried in a secret place.144.2 For ligature, or impotence, believed to be caused by witchcraft, the cuttings of the hair and nails are, in Germany, wrapped in a cloth, stuffed into a hole made in an elder-tree, and the hole closed with a plug of hawthorn.144.3 For infantine rupture, in Switzerland, some of the child’s nails and hair, with a piece of paper inscribed with his name, are put into a hole bored in a young oak, and the hole is then stopped with wax.144.4 Among the Transylvanian Saxons at Kronstadt the hair and nails of an anæmic patient are buried under a waxing moon beneath a rose-bush.144.5 Here the rose is evidently expected to diffuse its colour in the sick man’s veins. The collection just cited of old remedies in use in the Mark of Brandenburg directs that when hairs grow in an ulcer they should be plucked out and nailed up in an elder or oak-tree towards the east.144.6 The ancient English leech-book attributed to one Sextus Placitus prescribes, for a woman suffering from flux, to comb her hair under a mulberry tree, and hang the combings on an upstanding twig of the tree. When she is healed she must gather them again and preserve them. If on the contrary she desire ut menstrua fluant, the combings must be placed upon a twig hanging downwards.145.1 The mulberry appears to be chosen because of the form and colour of its fruit, in accordance with the old doctrine of Signatures whereby the remedy for a disease was pointed out by some fancied resemblance of form or colour to the diseased member. To restore falling hair, Etmuller, writing in the seventeenth century, advises burying some of the hair in an oak, or, to cure the gout, some of the toe-nails. Bronchitis in growing children is cured, among the Pennsylvanian Germans, by making a gimlet-hole in the door-frame at the exact height of the child’s head. A tuft of his hair is inserted, and the hole pegged up. As the child grows above the peg he will outgrow the disease. The door-frame appears to be a mere substitute for a tree.145.2