_Headache._--Cures to alleviate this tiresome pain are numberless. Mrs. Latham mentions what is considered by the Sussex peasantry a sure way of avoiding it in the spring, a piece of superstition we have already noticed: "No hair, either cut or combed from the head, must be thrown carelessly away, lest some bird should find it and carry it off, in which case the person's head would ache during all the time that the bird was busy working the spoil into its nest. 'I knew how it would be,' exclaimed a servant, 'when I saw that bird fly away with a bit of my hair that blew out of the window this morning when I was dressing; I knew I should have a clapping headache, and so I have.'" In some counties the common corn-poppy is called "headache," from the cephalalgic tendency of the scent.
_Hydrophobia._--From the most remote period no disease, perhaps, has possessed such a curious history, or been invested with so many superstitions as hydrophobia, and the countless remedies suggested for its cure form an important chapter in folk-medicine. In tracing back its history, we find that it was not only regarded by our ancestors with the same horror as now-a-days, but that every conceivable device was resorted to for removing its fatal effects. Thus, Pliny relates the case of a Roman soldier who was cured by the dog-rose, a remedy said to have been revealed to the man's mother in a dream. Among sundry other remedies he enumerates the hair of a man's head, goose-grease, fuller's earth, colewort, fish-brine, &c., as applications to the wounds. The favourite cure of Dioscorides was hellebore, and Galen's principal one was the river-crab. Sucking the wound seems also to have been considered efficacious. Passing on to modern times, the extraordinary remedies still employed are a convincing proof of the extent to which superstition occasionally reaches. The list, indeed, is not an inviting one, consisting amongst other things of the liver of a male goat, the tail of a shrew-mouse, the brain and comb of a cock, the worm under the tongue of a mad dog, horse-dung, pounded ants, and cuckoo soup. It may seem, too, incredible to us that less than a century ago the suffocation of the wretched victim was not unfrequently resorted to, and instances of this barbarous practice may be found in the periodical literature of bygone years. Thus, in _The Dublin Chronicle_ (28th October, 1798), the following circumstances are recorded:--"A fine boy, aged fourteen, was bitten by a lady's lap-dog near Dublin. In about two hours the youth was seized with convulsive fits, and shortly after with hydrophobia; and, notwithstanding every assistance, his friends were obliged to smother him between two feather beds." In the year 1712, four persons were tried at York Assizes for smothering a boy, who had been bitten by a mad dog, on a similar plea as that uttered by Othello:--