Animals as Medicine.

Waikato Times, Volume XXII, Issue 1842, 26 April 1884, Page 6 (Supplement)

Animals as Medicine.

The Nasty Medicines of Lizards, Bats, and Dogs that Our Forefathers Took — Consumption Cures — Stags' Horns — Cod Liver Oil, Bat Balsam and Whooping Cough Fed on Eoasted Hedgehogs. Medical men formerly held, and some old grannies still believo, that animals possess curative powers equal to anything in tho vegetable kingdom. Yon have a sore ; it ]icked by a dog how speedily it get 3 well 1 Every horseman and coachman knows that if his horse gets a cut above the hoof or near the fetlock, how quickly the coach dog heals it by licking. But this is nothing to some of the old-time animal remedies. When children in Scotland were troubled with worms, it was the custom to catch a quantity of garden worms, tie them up in a cotton bag and roast them over a slow fire. Then the decomposed remains were made into a salve, which was spread on the stomach of the child. In various parts of the South are found many people who swallow cobweb pills as a sovereign cure for ague, and that cobwebs are efficient to staunch the flow of blood from a wound almost everyone knows, but in Yorkshire, England, they swallow spiders for cramps, and it is not uncommon to find Yorkshiremen with a little pill box full of them, which they carry around in expectation of the ciamps as regularly as doe 3 the native of Indiana or Missouri take his rations of quinine and quinine and whisky before breakfast. These Yorkshire women pretend to cure Bore throat in a child by holding a frog in its mouth so that the reptile should imbibe the ailment. Whooping cough they cure by feeding roasted hedgehog, and at other times by pacing the sufferers under the belly of a piebald horse, or compelling them to wear a live caterpillar about their necks.