Ancient Rome and Modern Italy 47 



we are concerned. It is hardly necessary to remark that we are 

 not going to be much engaged with the remedies and therapeutics 

 of scientific pediatricians. Our concern will be with Italian folk- 

 medicine of the traditional sort. Very commonly, this has ele- 

 ments of magic in it which commend it in families where the ways 

 of thought and much of the daily life are primitive. Among such 

 people any diagnosis of disease must constantly include the pos- 

 sibility that a witch or sorcerer has been at work. It is, indeed, 

 hard to say whether lovers or ailing children are believed to fare 

 worse at the hands of such beldames and impostors. 



Italy is not the only enlightened country in this world of modern 

 science where there are people who, when doctoring a baby, put 

 more trust in some ignorant but shrewd old woman of their com- 

 munity than in any physician. 255 They have more faith in her 

 powers to nullify sorcery than in the prayers and exorcisms of the 

 parish priest. The local wise woman and practitioner in irregular 

 medicine, the medichessa, not only sells drugs of secret composition 

 and concocts fomentations of magic herbs, but uses mystic speech. 

 She can utter compelling incantations. 256 She is easier to confide 

 in than the state or commune doctor, who at any time may inter- 

 fere with his newfangled notions about sanitation and hygiene 

 which upset both human and animal life in the household. What 

 is more, they think that the maleficence of a witch or the influence 

 of an evil eye may be more responsible for baby's marasmus than 

 any malnutrition or dietary deficiency that a doctor dwells on. 257 " 

 It is witches also who keep the baby restless. 258 They are eager to 

 suck its untainted blood. Peasants who cherish such ideas as these 

 are not going to resort to the regular physicians who serve the well- 

 to-do and educated people of the town. They have access to lore 

 which may go back through generations of their ancestors, aye, 

 back even to their remote Roman forbears. 



The time when a child cuts its first teeth has always been a 

 period of maternal anxiety and of domestic insomnia. The an- 

 cients had various superstitions about it. When we read how mal- 

 ominous many Italians of our age consider it to be if a baby comes 

 into the world with teeth already cut, 259 we note with interest the 

 cases in antiquity when this premature equipment did not prevent 

 the "toothed" (dentatus) baby, or, at any rate, those who con- 

 tinued his name Dentatus from growing up to high distinction. 



