Superstitions. ‘ 173 
posed beneficial results of nostrums are, no doubt, due to a 
wrong diagnosis of the disease in most cases; and in some 
cases, the rabific poison may have worn itself out, and the 
subject has recovered, as he would have done without the 
“remedy ”—as in those instances described by M. Decroix. 
Our forefathers mingled more than a quant. suff. of super- 
stition with their treatment, and one shudders to contemplate 
the course a person was expected to go through when bitten 
by a dog. Galen recommends the ashes of a river crayfish, 
burnt alive on copper, and assures us that no one who took 
this ever died of the disease. The roasted liver of a mad 
dog was highly recommended, and the sufferer was literally 
recommended “to take a hair of the dog that bit him.” 
“Worming the tongue,” 1.e., extracting the little ligament 
beneath the tongue—a senseless and cruel practice—has been 
considered a certain preventive of madness, or, at least, of 
the power of communicating it to man, from the time of 
Pliny to the present. The more elaborate the compound, 
the more highly it was esteemed. “ Palinaris’s powder” was 
composed of equal parts rue, vervain, sage, polypody, plan- 
tain, mint, wormwood, mugwort, betony, balm, St. John’s 
wort, and lesser centaury, dried and powdered with some 
coralline, and given daily, in drachm doses, in a glass of 
sherry, for a month. Some of the remedies were quite 
as likely to end fatally as the disease. None, except those 
of the most robust constitutions, could endure being bound 
to a tree and having 200 buckets of the very coldest water 
dashed over them; or survive being bled to fainting, then 
bound in a chair and fed on bread and water for twelve 
months—though a woman actually was so “cured.” 
Celsus insists on immersing the patient in the sea until he 
is nearly drowned, and making him swallow a great quantity 
of the water as “the only remedy.” In the Philosophical 
Transactions of the Royal Society, we find a recipe for a 
decoctum ad morsum canis rabidi, consisting of tin filings, 
garlic, and rue, boiled in wine or strong beer, and mixed 
