The Snail Cure

In eighteenth-century Norfolk, England, a common cough cure involved brewing a broth of boiled snails or "dodmans" as they called them. Snails were regarded as handy little critters as their slime was considered to be an important folk-medicine treatment for "straightening children's deformed limbs."

Snails have also been used to treat warts; all you had to do was get the snail to "walk" over the wart. Snail slime has also been used as a treatment for thrush (er, what?) and a snail soaked in vinegar and rolled in flour was reckoned a good treatment for rheumatism.

Before the advent of evidence-based medicine, it was believed that if you sprained your wrist, you could cure this malady by tying a red cloth soaked in urine around the damaged wrist. However, treatment was slightly more difficult to achieve in the Scottish Highlands, as a thread made from the sinew of a "rutting stag", was required!

Urine was a useful remedy in times of war, as having someone wee on your wound was an efficient way to clean it, as urine is generally sterile. The Roman's went one step further and made mouthwash and toothpaste out of their urine. But that's a wee bit daft. No?

Crossing the ocean to North America, a common treatment for a sore throat involved tying a strip of bacon, or other meat around your throat, which could later serve for lunch. However, if you wanted to get rid of an ugly wart, you would need to acquire some "stolen meat", to rub on the wart.  Though, if you couldn't manage to steal some meat, then you could try another remedy, which required rubbing the wart with the morning spit of a dog.

In Germany, during the Middle Ages, if you were suffering from a tooth-ache, you couldn't just go to a dentist, as this job didn't exist yet. You could, however, look for a donkey and kiss it to get some relief. Or, you could try another remedy for tooth-ache, which involved drinking a solution of powered human skull. Well, that is what people believed.

North American folk medicine also had weird remedies for baby teething problems, as the bone from the head of a hog, or a mole's foot, was recommended as a cure.

The Irish, not to be left out, boiled sheep-poo in milk to treat whooping-cough, which is creative, to say the least. But then, the resourceful Ancient Egyptians, applied bat blood to the eyes of the blind, as they reasonably noted that bats had great eye sight. But, like many pre-scientific people, the Egyptians also thought that illness was caused by devils or the evil-eye of your neighbour.


Books To Read


Celtic Legends: Heroes and Warriors, Myths and Monsters, by Michael Kerrigan.