incident a secret crime.
The preservation of health and the prolongation of life are necessarily objects of
interest to all mankind, and it was natural enough that around them should
flourish a rank growth of superstitions.
To ailing or diseased persons all kinds of potions, pills, and powders were
administered in the past as they are in the present; but whereas we are now
content with the mystic characters endorsed on his formula by the physician, our
ancestors were not satisfied unless certain mystical words, numbers, or
ceremonies accompanied them. The sign of the cross was in constant requisition;
or the medicine was to be taken according to mystical numbers—thrice or nine
times, as the case might be. For hooping-cough was prescribed a draught from
the horn of a living ox, nine times repeated. The patient was also put “nine
several times” in the miller’s hopper.
The importance ascribed to the figure of a circle is probably a relic of the
influence of the old sun-worship. Consumptive invalids, or children suffering
from hectic fever, were thrice passed through a circular wreath of woodbine, cut
during the increase of the March moon, and let down over the body from head to
foot. We read of a sorceress who healed sundry women by “taking a garland of
green woodbine, and causing the patient to pass thrice through it.” Afterwards,
the garland was cut in nine pieces, which were cast into the fire—generally an
indispensable particular in ceremonies of this kind. Another passed her patient
through a heap of green yarn, which the nurse shook, and then divided it into
nine pieces, which were buried in the lands of three owners. A certain Thomas
Grieve directed a patient to pass thrice through a heap of yarn, which he duly
burned. He also cured the wife of a Michael Glanis by having a hole broken on
the north side of the chimney, and putting a hoop of yarn thrice through it, and
taking it back at the door; and thereafter compelling the patient to go nine times
through the said hoop of yarn.
White of Selborne tells us of a custom, prevalent in his time in the south of
England, of stripping feeble and diseased children, and transmitting them head
foremost through an artificial cleft in a young tree, the several parts of which
were held forcibly asunder. The wound was then bound up carefully, and it was
expected that the child would recover as the tree healed. If the cleft did not unite,