h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"Anything, so long as it's prescribed by the rider of a piebald horse."

That's the answer. The question is : "What did the good folks of 19th-Century West Sussex take to cure whooping cough?"

And it's true. More to the point, it worked. Here's a description of the subject from the journal of Folklore:

***
We have another infallible remedy for whooping-cough in whatever may be prescribed by the rider of a piebald horse. A man who was the owner of one lived a few years ago at Petworth, and never rode out on it without being accosted by some mother of a family, and solicited to tell her the best cure for whooping-cough. Sometimes he would reply "Ale and butter," sometimes "Honey and vinegar," in short, any strange compound that first occurred to him. But however strange might be the advice, it was always implicitly followed, and, said Mrs. Cooper, my informant, "the result has always been the same - the sick children were cured".
***

So on to the quiz. This time we'll play True or False. Which of these 19th-Century West Sussex folk remedies are true, and which have I fiendishly made up?

* * *

1. Toothache: Carry a paw cut from a live mole.

2. Baldness: Carry a squirrel's tail in a pigskin pouch. As the tail withers, the hair returns.

3. Bad acne: Pass the child nine times every morning on nine successive days at sunrise through a cleft in a sapling ash tree.

4. Malaria: Wear a leaf of tansy in your shoes.

5. Whooping cough: Hang round the neck of the patient a silk bag filled with hair cut from the cross on the neck of a donkey; borrow the donkey; place the patient on its back, with his or her face looking towards its tail, and lead it to a certain spot fixed on in your own mind, three times running, for three succeeding days.

6. Rheumatism: Place your shoes in the form of a cross every night by the side of your bed.

7. Sword wounds:  Keep the weapon polished and bright until the injured part is healed.

8. Headaches: make sure no hair either cut or combed from your head is thrown carelessly away. If some bird should find it and carry it off, your head will ache during all the time that the bird was busy working it into its nest.

9. Jaundice: Eat a live spider rolled up in butter.

10. Swollen thyroid: Pass the hand of a corpse (ideally a dead criminal) several times over the swollen part.

11. Muscular debility: Roast nine mice to a cinder, powder them till they are as fine as dust, then swallow this in a glass of ale.

12. Warts: prick them with pins, then stick the pins into an ash-tree. As they become embedded in the growing bark, the warts will gradually disappear.

* * *

Feel free to post your guesses below. Smiley prizes will be awarded!

Answers next week - Good luck!

Those all sound reasonable to me, as folk superstitions.

I know number 11 is true, it workd for me anyhow...

I'm just glad to have finally found a use for the dead burglar's hand I've been keeping, you know, just in case, as you do.

Deb

I think 3, 4, and 6 are faulse, all the rest seem logical enough to me...

[Amy P]

1. That had better be false.
2. True. Even though I doubt it would work. But we could ask the Prof to try it. He lives in Yorkshire, though, maybe it only works in Sussex.
3. False. I don't believe people in folkloric times had acne. That's a disease caused by eating pizza and chips.
4. True, I'll bet. Even though I have no idea what tansy is. Why did they get malaria in Sussex, anyway? That's a tropical disease.
5. False. You made that up, because it's too complicated. Backwards on a horse, indeed.
6. True. Definitely. Pseudo-religious cures 'r' us.
7. True - at least, other people used to do this in the Middle Ages, so why not here?
8. True. I'll buy that. At least, lots of people used to insist on taking their cut hair home from the barber's, especially in New Orleans, where it was definitely a good idea. Too many houngans per square mile.
9. UGH. I'll say true, just because it's gross.
10. True - I base this guess on the likelihood of goiters and other thyroid disorders among Brits, added to the morbid factor.
11. Maybe I'm getting gullible here, but I'll say true.
12. True. Oh, now that one sounds like it might actually work.

Okay, now you've done it. My inner Nigel, coupled with a mispent youth as a medievalist, have led me to believe far too many of these 'cures'.

What Sussex needed in folklore time was a good HMO.

7 is true? But why would the guy who wounded you with a sword let you polish it up?

I think you had to steal it from him. But I've read that, anyway.

Well, whole, fried mice on toast are a cure for nosebleeds, so why not powder them, too?

I'll never forgive McD for taking their whole fried mice off the menu...

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