If the weather, on the whole, is outside of man’s control, not so with love and health – his two chief fields for charms and cures. Folk medicine shows some division of labor – in so far as the men minister to the farm animals and stock or serve as “wart takers,” “yerb” doctors, and “chills an’ fever” doctors – and some scientific foundation, in the empiric “materia medica” (developed by trial and error) of herbs, leaves, barks, roots, seeds, fat meat, etc., used for teas, poultices and unguents. But the woman, especially the “granny woman” or midwife, the herb woman, and the old woman who has raised a large family to healthy maturity, were the chief practitioner; and mysticism, and the doctrines of the scapegoat and of “like cure like” (signatures and “the hair of the dog that bit one”) predominate.
Thus the poison of tobacco kills poison in the system; smoking makes the corpulent “spit their fat away”; grease rendered from red earthworms mixed with turpentine, asafetida, and red-onion juice makes a good liniment because all these substances draw their strength from the earth; snake oil cures snake bites; onions are used to take up “yallar jaundice”, the cut halves of the onion turning yellow as they take up the disease from the air; a child may be cured of fits by giving it a small dog to play and sleep with so that the dog “takes” the fits from the child and dies; a sty or venereal disease may be cured by passing it on to another; warts may be “bought” or “charmed off” by tying an equal number of knots in a horsehair or string and buying, burning or losing it. On the whole charms cures lend themselves to the treatment of ailments characterized by sudden appearance and disappearance, seizure, or unpredictability, such as fits, insanity, rheumatism, bleeding, chills and fever, etc. or panaceas (spitting on a stone to relieve pain) or preventives (wearing asafetida, a buckeye, beads, red flannel, a copper ring, wrist or angle band, a coin).
Folk medicine naturally attaches more importance to the “spell” than to the “simple”, and there is a good deal of hocus pocus in “healing”, especially in the treatment of affections due to heat and cold, which seem to require the cast out of demons. E.g. old women can cool fevers by the laying of hands; chills can be driven away by boring a deep hole in the sunny side of an oak tree, blowing your breath into it, and plugging up the hold, with the result that the tree dies, fire can be driven out of burns and scalds by blowing or spitting upon the inflammation,, holding it close to a hot fire or stove, or applying a moistened finger tip and muttering some mystic “sayin’”, such as a verse from the Bible, passed on from a person of the opposite sex and shrouded in secrecy, lest the charm be broken. Similar magic formulae are used to heal warts, ulcers, “risin’s”, sties, etc., and to stop bleeding; a posthumous child can cure croup or “thrash” by blowing into the patient’s mouth; seventh sons of seventh sons and persons born with a caul are “double-sighted” and make good doctors. Yet in spite of all this there is rarely a suspicion of charlatanism, positive deception or insincerity, since most of the healing is done and taken in good faith.