_Erysipelas._--This distemper has been popularly called "St. Anthony's Fire," from the legend that it was miraculously checked by that saint when raging in many parts of Europe in the eleventh century. An amulet formerly worn to ward it off was made of the elder on which the sun had never shone. "If," says an old writer, "the piece between the two knots be hung about the patient's neck, it is much commended. Some cut it in little pieces, and sew it in a knot in a piece of a man's shirt." A remedy in use among the lower orders, and extending as far as the Highlands, is to cut off one half of the ear of a cat, and to let the blood drop on the part affected--a practice which is evidently a survival of the primitive notion that a living sacrifice appeased the wrath of God.
_Fits._--Numerous indeed have been the charms invented for those suffering from this malady, and in many cases they are "marvellously mystical withal." Thus that little animal the mole has been in request, as the following mystic prescription will show. A gentleman residing in 1865, on the border ground of Norfolk and Suffolk, was one day asked by a neighbour to catch a live mole, as "her darter's little gal was subject to fits, and she had been told that if she got a live mole, cut the tip of his nose off, and let nine drops bleed on to a lump of sugar, and gave that to the child, 'twas a sartin cure." Here again we have the same notion of a sacrifice, one which, it may be noticed, underlies many of the charms of this kind. A Devonshire remedy is to go into a church at midnight and to walk three times round the Communion table, while many single women wear a silver ring on the wedding-ring finger, made out of sixpences which have been begged from six young bachelors.
_Gout._--The periodical attacks of this disease have from the earliest times been subjected to the influence of charms, blackberries being considered by the Greeks a good specific. Culpeper has bequeathed to us a curious remedy. He says, "Take an owl, pull off her feathers, and pull out her guts; salt her well for a week, then put her into a pot, and stop it close, and put her into an oven, that so she may be brought into a mummy, which, being beat into powder and mixed with boar's grease, is an excellent remedy for gout, anointing the grieved place by the fire." The germander speedwell has been esteemed highly efficacious, and the Emperor Charles V. is reported to have derived benefit from it.