left shoe under the heel. Then thou shalt soon hear of it."
Transferring Diseases.
It was widely believed that disease could be transferred by means of certain silly formalities. This was a very ancient notion. Pliny explains how pains in the stomach could be transferred to a duck or a puppy. A prescription of about two hundred years ago for the cure of convulsions was to take parings of the sick man's nails, some hair from his eyebrows, and a halfpenny, and wrap them all in a clout which had been round his head. This package must be laid in a gateway where four lanes meet, and the first person who opened it would take the sickness and relieve the patient of it. A certain John Dougall was prosecuted in Edinburgh in 1695 for prescribing this treatment. A more gruesome but less unjust proceeding was to transfer the disease to the dead. An example is the treatment of boils quoted from Mr. W. G. Black's "Folk Medicine." The boil was to be poulticed three days and nights, after which the poultices and cloths employed were to be placed in the coffin with a dead person and buried with the corpse. In Lancashire warts could be transferred by rubbing each with a cinder which must be wrapped in paper and laid where four roads meet. As before, the person who opens this parcel will take the warts from the present owner. In Devonshire a child could be cured of whooping cough by putting one of its hairs between slices of bread and butter and giving these to a dog. If the dog coughed, as was probable, the whooping cough was transferred.
