Old Notions

Feilding Star, Volume XIII, Issue 94, 6 February 1892, Page 4

Old Notions

* The curious beliefs of the mediaeval English as to the cause and cure of various diseases were often even .nore shocking than absurd, if auch could be possible, says the St Louis Republic. A ring made of the hinge or handle of a coffin was credited with the power of relieving cramps, which also received a solace when a rusty sword was hung up by the patient's bedside. Nails driven into an oak tree was not a cure but a preventive of toothache. A halter which had been used in hanging a murderer, when bound around the temples, was said to be an infallible remedy for headache. A dead's man hand conld dispel tumors of the glands by stroking the parts nine times with it, but the hand of a man who had been hanged and then cut down from the gallows by a maiden was a remedy infinitely more efficacious. Some of these remedies still exist among the superstitious poor of the provinces, but are not now strictly adhered to. The chips of a gallows upon which several persons had been hanged was also one of the items in mediaeval materia niedica ; these, when in a bag around the neck, were pronounced an infallible cure for ague. The nightmare, supposed, of course, to be the result of something supernatural, was. ' banished ' fay means of a stone with a; hole in}ii^,jwhiqh was suspended at the head of ;^he sufferer's bed. The last, remedy , went by the name of " hag-stone," because it prevented the s watches' 'from coming and sitting on the patient's stomach. The witches^which from popular pictures could not .have sat -Upon a horse a moment, were credited when riding them across the moor at breakneck speed at the dead hour of midnight, when better disposed and less frisky persons were asleep. In case 3of this kind a • f ha ! gHstone'*^ied L tQ. stable-door »t once put a atop to tfiese heathenish vagaries. ,'.'*. ."-; ,'v • '