244 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of the body. In Massachusetts it is believed that to be efficacious 

 the skin must be that of a black cat. In one country town in 

 eastern Massachusetts the same remedy is recommended for hives. 

 A reputed cure for asthma, still extant in Boston, is to wear a 

 muskrat-skin, the hair to come next the chest of the patient. A 

 correspondent from central New York knoivs of inflammation of 

 the bowels having been cured by applying the flesh side of the 

 pelt of a freshly killed lamb. In parts of Ohio it is thought that 

 chilblains may be quickly relieved by wrapping the feet in a 

 " warm, bloody rabbit-skin" (hare-skin). The last-named remedy 

 calls to mind the method of curing ruddiness of the face by anoint- 

 ing it overnight with hare's blood, cited in that incomparable med- 

 ley of wisdom and folly, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. The 

 nausea attendant on the painful disease called milk-sickness, 

 which is so dreaded in many of the newly settled parts of the 

 Western States, may, it is said, be allayed by drinking hot water 

 into which has been dropped a little freshly drawn blood of a 

 chicken. Canadian lumbermen, when fortunate enough to shoot 

 a deer, often wrap themselves at night in its skin in order to keep 

 off witches. 



Pliny, in his Natural History, states that the bite of a serpent 

 may be cured by immediately applying to the wound a living 

 mouse, split asunder, or the warm flesh stripped from the bones 

 of a cock. We find a possible survival of these ancient Roman 

 remedies in the application of the freshly cut surface of a stunned 

 domestic fowl to a snake-bite. The poison is supposed to be ab- 

 sorbed by the quickly circulating blood of the chicken and finally 

 to kill it. If it die before most of the poison is thought to have 

 been absorbed, another is at once to be applied. This mode of 

 treatment is reported from Michigan, but I have reason to believe 

 that in a more or less modified form it prevails rather generally 

 where poisonous snakes are found. In northern Ohio they say 

 that a living fowl cut open and applied while bleeding constitutes 

 another cure for " shingles." In the town of Woburn, Mass., it is 

 not snake-poisoning or shingles, but scarlet fever and diphtheria, 

 that may be cured by applying to the chest the palpitating body 

 of a hen that has been stunned and immediately cut open. This 

 last remedy recalls the account of the last illness of Philip of Bur- 

 gundy (Philip the Good), in Charles Reade's admirable mosaic of 

 mediaeval life, The Cloister and the Hearth. You remember that 

 in the latter part of the fifteenth century the duke lay sick at 

 Bruges with the disease now known as diphtheria. " Ho ! this is 

 grave. Flay me an ape incontinent and clap him to the duke's 

 breast," says the doctor. But no ape was to be had. " Then Doc- 

 tor Remedy grew impatient and bade flay a dog. l A dog is next 

 best to an ape, only it must be a dog all of one color.' So they 



