2 3 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



in the other, but that they all depend upon that principle which is 

 common to them all — the principle of suggestion. 



The strange, the mysterious and the weird have great suggestive 

 potency, and hence drugs culled at unearthly hours, during unusual 

 conjunctions of the moon and planets, on St. John's or St. Agnes' Eve, 

 have unusual curative properties. The rare stone bezoar, or bezar — a 

 concretion found in the intestines of certain animals like goats — was 

 believed in colonial New England to have magical powers. Any 

 mysterious rite may be efficacious if linked with a vague but strong 

 superstitious belief. In 1884, two children in Suffolk, England, between 

 Needham and Barking, were reported cured of infantile hernia by means 

 of the cleft-ash rite. The procedure was as follows : A sapling was split 

 upward, beginning a few feet from the ground and tied at the top to 

 prevent the cleft from extending all the way up. The cleft was held 

 open and the child passed through three times, head downward, each 

 time by a different person. The sapling was then bound up securely 

 at short intervals. It grew together again — which was supposed to be 

 the reason why the children recovered. 



Miracles are sometimes due to the reinforcement of suggestion by the 

 fascinatingly horrible, and hence the curative property of things asso- 

 ciated with corpses, skulls, gallows, graveyards and so on. One of the 

 many remedies for ague in England is to wear chips from a gallows 

 around one's neck; for a wen one should go alone at night to the spot 

 where a fresh corpse lies — preferably that of an executed criminal — 

 and pass its hand over the wen. A poor woman living in the neighbor- 

 hool of Hartlepool, England, some years ago was induced by a " wise 

 woman " to go alone at night to an outhouse where a suicide lay await- 

 ing the coroner's inquest and to hold the hand of the corpse on her 

 wen all night. She died shortly after from mental shock. Another 

 woman at Cuddesden, Oxfordshire, asked for the hand of a corpse in 

 order to cure a goiter. Her father, she said, had been cured by the same 

 means, the swelling having diminished as the hand mouldered away. 

 In 1850, it was common for numbers of invalids in certain parts of 

 England to congregate round the gallows in order to receive the " death 

 stroke " — the touch of an executed criminal's hand. The practise 

 declined because of the high fees the hangmen came to charge for 

 applying the remedy. 



There was a time when powdered mummy was a highly valued medi- 

 cine throughout Europe. Carbonized and powdered animals are still 

 used in China and Japan, as crushed bones once were in England. The 

 celebrated chemist, Eobert Boyle, relates, in his essay on " The Porous- 

 ness of Animal Bodies," how, " having been one summer frequently sub- 

 ject to bleed at the nose and reduced to employ several remedies to check 

 the distemper, that which I found the most effectual to staunch the blood 



