52 Conception, Birth and Infancy in 



its mouth. 305 Such a pastoral doctor would, no doubt, sometimes 

 get his fee "in kind" and not like it. 



Sometimes we can relate a modern outrage to therapy or decency 

 with an ancient. The powder of calcined oyster shells mixed with 

 stale wine made a sort of salve that a Roman baby might have 

 smeared on a skin eruption or on running ulcers. 306 It may be 

 at least harmless to wash a child today in a decoction of rue to keep 

 off any evil from witchcraft, but what shall we say of the practice 

 of washing it in wine to make it robust? 307 There are ignorant 

 women dwelling in the region of Perugia, and probably in other 

 places, who not only change their baby's garments infrequently in 

 the belief that its combined excretions will insure its growing up 

 with a soft, white skin, but themselves use the child's urine as a 

 cosmetic face-wash. 308 



Knowing, as I do, that a remedy which seems to be in vogue in 

 all parts of Italy for curing a child of his habit of wetting the bed 

 is to feed him a mouse without his knowing what he eats, 309 I am 

 not surprised to find that boiled mice were already recommended 

 for this incontinence nineteen centuries ago. 310 In fact, the ali- 

 mentary canal of Egyptian children, mummified ages earlier, has 

 revealed the remains of mice which were unquestionably taken as 

 medicine. Pliny recommends them for numerous ailments. Ad- 

 ministered roasted, they would stop a child from dribbling at the 

 mouth. That we may well believe. 



When a baby arrives in the world weak and near suffocation, the 

 mother of it may be advised in some parts of Italy to cut the throat 

 of a black hen and clap the animal, still palpitating, on the hind 

 parts of the child, col becco infisso nell' ano. If my reader knows 

 the Italian word for beak, he can shock his sense of delicacy by 

 translating the rest with no help from me. The hen is supposed 

 to swell up, correcting the baby's condition by drawing out the 

 causes of it. 311 The very color of the bird, an essential specifica- 

 tion, suggests that we have here a bit of the black art in operation, 

 and not merely a new sort of poultice that is credited with an un- 

 usual drawing power. The method used is merely a modern ex- 

 emplification of a common procedure in antiquity by which a dis- 

 ease is transmitted from an ailing person to some animal victim 

 which thereupon suffers a vicarious death. When, for example, 

 the Roman applied to the abdomen of someone who was afflicted 



