HOW THE JAPANESE CURE DISEASE BY BURNING.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1758, 3 July 1888, Page 4

HOW THE JAPANESE CURE DISEASE BY BURNING.

While we lunched in the open quadrangle before the temple (says a Japanese correspondent) groups of cheery Japanese causa in, chattering as gaily as any picnickers could wish to, look off their straw sandals, washed their feet, and disappeared in jolly parties to the interior of the temples. When we dropped’ our shoes and followed to the one upper room, wo found our jolly chatterers all there, silting in rowes with their faces to the walls. All were stripped to the waist, and the •Id priest made marks on their hacks in sacred characters to indicate where moxa should be burned, following him came a small boy with what appeared to be very sticky dough in one hand. With dexterous fingers this youngster pinched off a bit of dough, rolled it into a small cone, and stuck it over the priest’s mark. After him came a staid, stoical youngster, who, in a most cold-blooded way, touched a mutch to the tip of the moxa cone, and went down the lines giving lights. It burned without flame, a slow, red glow like charcoal, consuming the cono down to the flesh, where it fizzled and smoked for a few seconds, that must have seemed years to tho victims. Searing with a red-hot iron would be a quick and human treatment compared to this glow, i ating fire of the moxa. Tho men and women that I matched for the few minute that JL could endure it, stood it heroically, but by the tension of every muscle in their backs and arms, one could judge of their agony. One old man folded bis arms, bent lus head over, and indulged in suppressed chuckles that varied with groans and hysterical ha! ha ! ha’s ! A woman buried her face iu a blue cotton towel, and made no sign or movement, while two moxa cones were burning down and into her flesh. A young man started to roll tiand fro when the lire began entering into bis bones, but goon stopped ii, braced himself, and sat motionless, Tim priest having set his se.a 1 on his victims, sat down by a brazier, put on his big spectacles, and was soon Just iu reading a pious book, wholly indifferent to the backs frizzling beside him. This Mine priest has some secret of composition for his moxa dough that has kept it in favor for many years, and about the only revenue of the temple ,is from his patient’s fees. For rheumatism, lumbago, and such aches and ills it is most beneficial, and gives quick relief to auy one heroic enough to endure it. The Japanese resort to moxa for almost everything that ails them, and one sees coolies with their backs and the calve* of their legs covered with moxa scars- Foreign doctors have discovered the virtues of the treatment for certain things, and in Paris many cases of paralysis have been successfully treated, Charles Summer having been one of the famous cases of those whose paralysed nerves were revived by the moxa. A variation of the treatment, used in Paris under the name of moxa, consists in burning with white-hot irons, which is much less painful than with paste cones, and Clara Morris was one of the best advertised subjects undergoing the white-iron moxa. When the patients descended from tho moxa room, put on their sandals, and muttered a sullen prayer toward the open door of the temple, they were hardly to be identified with the gay people who had arrived earlier; and when they walked, it was plain by the way they held their shoulders that the raw places still smarted.