SNAILS AS MEDICINE 



a cure for various kinds of diseases and injuries. Pliny the elder 

 recommends them for a cough and for a stomach-ache, but it is 

 necessary " to take an uneven number of them." ^ Five African 

 slugs, roasted and beaten to a powder, with half a drachm of 

 acacia, and taken with myrtle wine, is an excellent remedy for 

 dysentery. Treated in various ways, snails have been considered, 

 in modern times, a cure for ague, corns, web in the eye, scorbutic 

 affections, hectic fevers, pleurisy, asthma, obstructions, dropsy, 

 swelling of the joints, headache, an impostume (whitlow), and 

 burns. One of Pliny's remedies for headache, which competes 

 with the bones of a vulture's head or the brain of a crow or an 

 owl, is a plaister made of slugs with their heads cut off, which is 

 to be applied to the forehead. He regards slugs as immature 

 snails, whose growth is not yet complete {nondum perfcdae). 

 Lovell states that " a large trade in snails is carried on for 

 Covent Garden market in the Lincolnshire fens, and that they 

 are sold at 6d. per quart, being much used for consumptive 

 patients and weakly children." 



The custom still seems to linger on in some parts of the 

 country. Mr. E. Eundle, of the Eoyal Cornwall Infirmary, gives 

 his experience in the following terms : " I well remember, some 

 twelve years since, an individual living in an adjoining parish 

 [near Truro] being pointed out to me as ' a snail or slug eater.' 

 He was a delicate looking man, and said to be suffering from 

 consumption. Last summer I saw this man, and asked him 

 whether the statement that he was a ' snail eater ' was true : he 

 answered, ' Yes, that he was ordered small white sIucts — not 

 snails — and that up till recently he had consumed a dozen or 

 more every morning, and he believed they had done him good.' 

 There is also another use to which the country people here put 

 snails, and that is as an eye application. I met with an instance a 

 few weeks since, and much good seemed to have followed the use." - 



A reverend Canon of the Church of England, whose name I 

 am not permitted to disclose, informs me that there was a belief 

 among the youth of his native town (Pontypool, in Monmouth- 

 shire) that young slugs were ' good for consumption,' and that 

 they were so recommended by a doctor who practised in the 

 town. The slugs selected were about ^ inch long, " such as may 

 be seen crawling on the turf of a hedge-bank after a shower of 



1 Hist. Nat. XXX. 15, 19. - Science Gossi}}, 1891, p. 160. 



