I20 SNAILS AS MEDICINE chap. 



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, obstruc- 

 tions, 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 

 perfectae). 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. Rundle, of the Royal 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 slugs — 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." 2 



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 (Pont}' pool, in Mon- 

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

 that they were so recommended by a doctor Avho practised in 

 the town. The slugs selected were about f inch long, " such as 

 1 Hist. Nat. XXX. 15, 19. =^ Science Gossip, 1891, p. lOG. 



