The empirical character of drug-treatment is shown by such a record as this, taken from the Nineteenth Century:
In Lincolnshire a girl, suffering from the ague, cuts a lock of her hair and binds it around an aspen tree, praying the latter to shake in her stead. The remedy for a toothache at Tavistock, in Devonshire, is to bite a tooth from a skull in the churchyard, and keep it always in the pocket. At Loch Carron, in Ross-shire, an occasional cure for erysipelas, is to cut off half the ear of a cat, and let the blood drip on the inflamed surface. In Cornwall, the treatment for the removal of whelks, or small pimples, from the eyelids of children, is to pass the tail of a black cat nine times over the part affected. Toads are made to do service in divers manners in Cornwall and Northampton, for the cure of nose-bleeding and quinsy; while toad powder, or even a live toad or spider, shut up in a box, is still in some places accounted as useful a charm against contagion as it was in the days of Sir Kenelm Digby. The old smallpox and dropsy remedy, known as pulvis œthiopicus, was nothing more nor less than powdered toad.
