Superstitions and Bodily Health
by Diane Scott Lewis Before modern medicine lay people and some physicians held the belief that transferring the ailment to another object could cure you of disease. Since antiquity, and well into the eighteenth century, people believed that men reflected aspects of the natural world. It was a dominant strategy that explained the mysteries beyond the ken of the science of the day. A man in late seventeenth century Somerset claimed that his brother was cured of a rupture by being passed through a slit cut in a young ash tree, three times on three Monday mornings before dawn. When the tree was later cut down, his brother grew ill again. To cure jaundice, you took the patient’s urine, mix it with ashes and make three equal balls. Put these before a fire, and when they dried out, the disease leaves and he’s cured. In Devon, to cure the quartan ague, you baked the patient’s urine into a cake, then fed the cake to a dog, who would take on the disease. Even Richard Wiseman—a Barber Surgeon...