Note 163.1 — Chapter X · WITCHCRAFT: PHILTRES—PREVENTIVE AND REMEDIAL LEECHCRAFT.

In enumerating a few instances of the former class, let me first refer to the fact that touching or stroking with the hand of a corpse is a remedy known in every part of Europe for superficial growths like wens, tetters, and swollen glands. In September 1892, a fashionably dressed young woman was one day seen hovering about a physician’s residence in the north of Berlin. When he went out she met him and timidly prayed him to take her, when he had an opportunity, to a dead body. He thought she must be suffering from overstrain or mental disorder, and brusquely refused her. In nowise daunted, however, she begged him earnestly to grant her request, explaining that her object was to remove a deformity. As she said this, she laid bare a delicate white hand blemished by a bony outgrowth, known among surgeons as exostosis. The medical man became interested; and it was not long before he stood with her in the presence of a corpse. The lady grasped the cold right hand and with it repeatedly and silently stroked the ugly excrescence. Then, without speaking, she left the room in all haste; nor was the physician able to learn who she was, or what had led her to seek this means of relief.163.1 In the good old days, when what was called Justice was chiefly exhibited in hanging men with short shrift on every convenient pretext and at every convenient place, this remedy was much easier to obtain than it is to-day. In Europe it was universal; and perhaps it was partly the facility for touching an executed criminal that led to a preference in popular pharmacopœia for such corpses. Partly also it may have arisen from another cause. The victims of violence are often regarded as endowed after death with extraordinary virtue. When that violence took the form of persecution for adherence to the Church, the Church herself encouraged and systematised the superstition to her own profit. Popular sympathy with unmerited suffering extended the Church’s doctrine to other murders, judicial murders among them. And often the Church did not hesitate to sanction the popular canonisation, and appropriate the material gains that followed. But beyond all that the Church could sanction, there remained a margin constantly supplied by the bloodthirsty tribunals, as well as by private enterprise. The former may have been more regular in their action; but one thing is certain. Their victims were more uniformly derived from the classes which were chiefly concerned in forming and preserving tradition. The feeling of oppression would be likely to generalise all executions into martyrdoms, entailing miraculous powers analogous to those recognised by the Church. This would be enough to intensify the operation of any potency believed to be the ordinary property of a corpse, and so to favour the resort to the bodies of criminals.164.1