LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume IV, Issue 323, 25 June 1875, Page 3

LITERATURE.

CURIOUS CURATIVES. Either man is an obtusely perverse creature, or the inventors of heal-alls a set of very impudent impostors ; else doctors would long since have found their vocation gone. Panacea after panacea has been propounded for the benefit of a world in which, as Mr Disraeli puts it, health would seem to be a state of unnatural existence ; each new nostrum enjoying a brief term of popular favour, and then passing qiuckly out of memory. Anodyne necklaces, hot air baths, brandy and salt, galvanic rings, are a few among many universal remedies that have at one time or another been the rage. Thanks to a Bishop's enthusiasm, it became as common to call for a glass of tar-water at a coffee house as to ask for a dish of tea or coffee, although profane sceptics sneered at the specific and its advocates, and a dubious kind of friend wrote:

1 Who dare deride what pious Cloyne has done? The Church shall rise and vindicate her son ; She tells us, all her Bishops shepherds are, And shepherds heal their rotten sheep with tar." In our own days, cold water, innocent of tar, has been extolled far and wide as the one thing needful to wash disease away —a doctrine Burke, for one, would have scouted, for he held that hot water was the finest stimulant, and the most powerful restorative at man's command. Whenever he felt himself unwell, on went his kettle, and he thought nothing of drinking four or five quarts of boiling or nearly boiling water in a morning, pouring a pint or so into a basin, and taking it like soup, with a spoon. Indeed, the great Irishman put such strong trust in his simple panacea, that he would have had no hesitation in taking it, as a certain quack said his peculiar nostrum ought to be taken, externally, internally, and eternally. Suvaroff swore hunger was the best cure for all diseases, and warned doctors from his camp, for if hunger failed to work a cure, were there not herbs, roots, and pismires to be got? The fierce Russian's prescription would have been endorsed by Rulty, the Quaker physician, who records in his diary—" 1755, 3rd month, 29th day— A blessed repast of bread and water, a sovereign cure for indigestion, and no danger of a debauch." James I. wise as he esteemed himself, believed in the power of a certain elixier to render him ailment-proof. A Duke of Burgundy was fool enough to pay ten thousand florins for the recipe of a balsam warranted to make his memory transcendently good. Albertus of Saxony was not so easily gulled.

A learned Jew tried hard, to persuade him that wounds might be readily cured by means of pieces of parchment inscribed with Hebrew words and letters, selected from the Psalms. As he was arguing the matter one day, the duke suddenly drew his sword, wounded the unlucky curemonger in several parts of his body, and then coolly told him to try conclusions upon himself. Of course Albertus was never more troubled that way. The Saxon Duke certainly would never have wasted a penny upon the magical powder advertised in the Kingdom's Intelligencer, in January, 1661, in the following terms: "Sir Kenelm Digby's Sympathetical Powder, prepared by Promethean fire, curing all green wounds that come within the compass of a remedy, as also the toothache infallibly, is to be had at Mr Samuel Speed's, at the Printing Press, in St Paul's Churchyard. Sir Kenelm was as proud of his sympathetical powder as he was of his beautiful wife, and had, or professed to have, as much faith in it. According to his own account, he once took a bandage that had been worn by a gentleman who received a wound in the hand, while parting a conple of friends intent upon settliug a dispute with their swords, and put it into a solution of the powder, whereupon all pain departed from the injured member. A few hours afterwards Sir Kenelm took the bandage out of its bath, and placed it before the fire, causing the patient's servant to run in, exclaiming that his master's hand felt as hot as if it were between two fiery coals. The garter was replaced in the liquid, and left so for five or six days, by which time the wound had thoroughly healed. The formula for the preparation of this wonderful powder runs thus : Take Roman vitrol six ounces, beat it very small in a mortar, sift it through a fine sieve when the sun enters Leo, keep it in the heat of the sun by day, and in a dry place by night. Dinby said he was indebted to a Carmelite friar for the secret, picked up by the friar when travelling in Persia or Armenia.

The weapon-salve made by Paracelsus for the Emperor Maximilian was compounded of human fat and blood, mummy, oil of roses, oil of linseed, and moss from the skull of a healthy man who had come to a violent end. This delectable stuff had only to be applied to the weapon £with which a wound was inflicted, and a cure was sure to follow: though how, when the wound was given by an enemy, the sufferer was to get hold of the weapon we are not told. The hero of an old comedy, finding his weapon-salve fail him in his need, attributes the failure to some defect in his blood, not to any want of* virtue in the ointment, having been assured by the apothecary that thirty men blown up by a gunpowder explosion had been saved from death by merely dressing the smoke of! the powder with the miraculous unguent Honest John Hales, seeking to account for the cures placed to the credit of the salve, says shrewdly, ' A man is wounded; the weapon taken, and a wound-working salve applied to it; in the meanwhile the wounded man is commanded to use abstinence as much as may be, and to keep the wound clean. Whilst he does this the wound heals, and the weapon-salve bears away the bell!' On a similar principle, Morley, a once noted quack, used to cure scrofulous folks by hanging round the patient's neck a yard of white satin, with a vervain root at the end of it—taking care to supplement the action of the charm with mercury, antimony, ointments, cataplasms, plasters, poultices, and lotions. A doctor of our acquaintance took the trouble to analyse a popular patent remedy for rheumatism, and found the lotion to be salt and water, and yet it undoubtedly afforded great relief in some cases, because it was necessary to mix it with boiling water into which flannels were then dipped, and bound round the affected parts. The hot flannels eased the pain, and the lotion got the reputation of it. The weapon-salve does not stand alone as a proxy cure. Ruptured children used to be passed through a young wych-elm, split for the purpose, and afterwards bound up j the cure depending upon the tree growing together again. Scarlet fever was served with notice to quit by cutting a lock of hair from the sufferer's head, and forcing a donkey to swallow it; and in Greenland, children were sometimes buried alive as an infallible method of ridding their parents of any troublesome complaint. To be continued.