THE VIRTUES OF RATTLESNAKE OIL. 107 



category of religious superstition, as does a large part of savage medical 

 practice. 



In casting its skin every spring, the serpent seems to renew its life — a 

 marvellous and suggestive thing.' No wonder the childlike Indians saw 

 in this something supernatural, and stored the cast-off skins in the medi- 

 cine-bag, believing them endowed with fetishistic and remedial virtues. 

 " Itself thus immortal, they thought it could impart vitality to them. So, 

 when the mother was travailing in sore pain, and the danger neared that 

 the child would be born silent, the attending women hastened to catch 

 some serpent and give her its blood to drink." Among the red men of 

 the New World, as with ancient Esculapians in the Old, it stands as the 

 sign of the remedial art. 



Europeans were not slow in accepting these Indian ideas of medicine, 

 and have been still slower in giving them up. 



I have heard within very modern days of rattlesnake oil prescribed 

 as a febrifuge and for divers other ailments, while its value in rheumatism 

 is regarded by few persons with doubt. The demand for it is shown by 

 the fact that the serpents are often hunted systematically in order that 

 quantities of their oil may be obtained. That was the object the men 

 of Warren County, New York, had in killing the eleven hundred snakes 

 of which De Kay gives an account. Every summer, to this day, citizens 

 of Portland, Connecticut, go out to the Rattlesnake Ledges and catch the 

 reptiles with gaff-hooks, the local druggists paying them four dollars an 

 ounce for the oil, which finds ready sale. A prominent physician in 

 Washington told me of a case within his knowledge where a man suffer- 

 ing from an ulcer took a rattlesnake into his bed with the vague idea of 

 somehow extracting the virulence of the sore. In some rural districts 

 men wear the rattles in their hats as a remedy for headache; and I knew 

 of a case in the Watauga Mountains of North Carolina where a man who 

 was far gone with consumption hungthe body of a rattlesnake to dry and 

 smoke in his chimney, where he might nibble at it and get well. His faith 

 was weak, and he did not take the medicine ; but a sickly boy began to 

 pull the flesh from the skeleton, and grew fat and sturdy before he had 

 finished it. In the Eastern States it used to be considered a " specific " 

 in cases of epilepsy — a disease with which more witchcraft and super- 

 stition is mixed up than almost any other on the catalogue. 



No red- skinned sorcerer's medicine- bag is complete without some 

 fragment of this striking and half sacred reptile in it ; while negroes at 

 the South, who are sufficiently superstitious to wear charm-bags, regard 

 the curious rattles as among the most precious of their amulets. 



