The medical background of Anglo-Saxon England : a study in history, psychology, and folklore / [Wilfrid Bonser].

  • Bonser, Wilfrid, 1887-1972.
Date:
1963
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The medical background of Anglo-Saxon England : a study in history, psychology, and folklore / [Wilfrid Bonser]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    ‘If a man be in the water-elf disease {wester selfadl), . . . sing this many times, “May Earth bear upon thee with all her might and main”.’* Singer comments, ‘A water-elf has perhaps attacked one waterlogged with dropsy, and the earth will perhaps soak up the water.’ 1 2 Possibly the ‘new crock’ (mentioned in a prescription occurring in MS. Cotton Faustina A. X) which is to be ‘set in the earth up to the brim’ and filled with herbs for the preparation of an eye- salve, was to be so placed in order that the healing power of the earth might be brought into operation. 3 The practice, already mentioned, of drawing children through a hole in the earth so as to rid them of disease, which proved especially obnoxious to framers of penitentials, showed the belief in the efficacy of the earth as the element to which ailments could most safely be transferred. 4 This belief was derived from Latin antecedents and has parallels from Germany and elsewhere. Saserna’s charm for gout, for instance, given by Varro in his De re rustica, was to touch the earth, spit downwards, and sing twenty-seven times fasting: ‘O Earth, keep thou the pain, and health with me remain in my feet.’ 5 Alexander of Tralles records the following charm, also for gout: ‘Dig round the sacred herb Hyoscyamus [henbane] before sunset with the thumb and medicinal finger... and address it... “Take unto thyself the spirit and power of the Earth, thy mother, and dry up the rheum of this man or woman”.’ 6 Mogk notes the German belief that sick persons are to be laid down on the ground to be cured, and that the newborn child only acquires vital power when it is laid upon the ground. It has been the custom in Scandinavia from the oldest times to lay a child down on the earth as soon as it is born, and this is still a current Germanic observance. 7 The ‘Precatio Terrae Matris’ was quoted at the beginning of this chapter in connexion with the blessing of fields. But it is also a prayer to the mother of nature which produces and regenerates all 1 Leechbook HI, lxiii. 2 Introduction to Leechdoms (1961), p. xxxiv. 3 MS. Cotton Faustina A. X, fo. 1156 (quoted by Cockayne, Leechdoms, vol. iii, p. 292). 4 See p. 240. 5 Varro, De re rustica, i. 2. 27. 6 Alexander of Tralles, ed. Puschmann, 1879, vol. ii, p. 584. 7 E. Mogk, Article ‘Mutter Erde’, in Hoops, Reallexikon, p. 626.