Using Spiders as a Cure for Whooping-Cough by Fielding Hudson Garrison 1913

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Cured by wearing a spider hung around one's neck by Fielding Hudson Garrison 1913

In Norfolk, England, a spider was tied up in a piece of muslin and pinned over the mantelpiece as a remedy for whooping-cough. In Donegal, a beetle in a bottle was regarded as a cure for the latter disease; in Suffolk, to dip the child, head downward, in a hole dug in a meadow; in northeast Lincolnshire, fried mice; in Yorkshire, owl-broth; in other parts of England, riding the child on a bear; in Scotland, anything that might be suggested by a man riding upon a piebald horse. Compare these fallacies, inept as they seem, with what has happened so often in the history of therapeutics. A patient's cure follows seemingly upon the administration of some new-fangled remedy or drug. Immediately, a causal relation is established and the discoverer rushes into print with the glad tidings. Statistics begin to mount up, until presently the correlation-curve is perceived to have so insignificant a slope that nothing positive can be affirmed of the remedy whatever. It is then speedily consigned to the limbo of forgotten things. Not so with folk-remedies. The superstition becomes, as the derivation of the word implies, a "left-over"; and for a very important reason, namely, that in some cases "Nature cures the disease while the remedy amuses the patient"; in others a cure is, in all probability, brought about by the effect of the mind upon the body.

Black, the leading English authority on medical folk-lore, has made a careful and exhaustive classification of the different superstitions to which average suffering humanity is liable. These include ideas as to the possible transference of disease, sympathetic relationships, the possibility of new-birth or regeneration, the effects of such accidental specific factors as color, number, solar and lunar influences, magic writings, rings, precious stones, parts of the lower animals, and charms connected with the names of the saints, the lore of plants, the evil eye, birth, death, and the grave. To look into these is to see clearly that, of all human impulses,"none burn higher and holier than that of mysticism." As the savage "sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind," so his ancestors saw disease not as a quality or condition of the patient, but as something material and positive inside his body—a view held even by Paracelsus. From this idea arose a notion that disease could be transferred from one body to another, as where Pliny, in his Natural History, claims that abdominal pain can be transferred to a dog or a duck. Touching warts with pebbles, healing snake-bite by clapping the bleeding entrails of a bisected fowl to the wound (natural absorption), and the negro superstition of pegging a hank of the patient's hair into a tree in order to transfer chills and fever to the tree or its owner, are well-known forms of this curious belief. Sir Kenelm Digby proposed the following remedy for fever and ague: "Pare the patient's nails; put the parings in a little bag, and hang the bag around the neck of a live eel, and place him in a tub of water. The eel will die, the patient will recover." Closely connected with this idea of transference was the old tradition of a sympathy existing between parts of bodies separated in space, amusingly illustrated in Sir Kenelm's weapon-salve, which was applied to the weapon instead of the wound, and in the same worthy's

Strange hermetic powder
That wounds nine miles point blank would solder, 
By skilful chemist with great cost 
Extracted from a rotten post.

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