Note 172.3 — Chapter X · WITCHCRAFT: PHILTRES—PREVENTIVE AND REMEDIAL LEECHCRAFT.

“A hair of the dog that bit you” is a remedy which has passed into a proverb. In dealing with witchcraft we had occasion to note some instances of its application, as when the dust of a witch’s footprint is rubbed on the bespelled animal. The Abruzzians hold the bite of a cat to be venomous; and their prescription for it is a bit of the same cat’s fur applied with pounded garlic. So, for a serpent-bite a portion of the skin of the creature is put on the wound; but, as Signor Finamore remarks, the question is to get it.172.3 In Sicily the sting of one of the small scorpions found in damp places in the island is healed by scorpion-oil prepared from the same scorpion. The mode of preparing the oil is to decapitate the animal and plunge it into a vessel of oil, which is then closed tightly.172.4 In Devonshire a person who is bitten by a viper is advised at once to kill the creature and rub the wound with its fat; and the flesh of a rattlesnake is accounted the best cure for its own bite in the Northern States of America.172.5 In Belgium a dog’s bite is to be healed by inducing a bitch to lick the sore.173.1 The reason for the treatment is obscure in some of these cases; but we shall probably be right in referring its origin to the desire to set up union between the victim and the animal inflicting the wound, by means of a detached portion of the latter’s substance. This view is strengthened by the treatment directed, in the neighbourhood of Masulipatam, for a scorpion which has stung a man. The brute is to be caught by slipping a noose over its tail, and tied to something to prevent its wandering. For the more it wanders, the more the poison will wander in the man’s body; while to kill it may have the effect of killing its victim. Here the union by means of the injected poison is already complete, and the scorpion is dealt with accordingly.173.2