t. If they were found loose in the
morning, a full recovery was confidently looked for, but the cure
remained doubtful when they were found at morning dawn still bound. I
was lately informed by the Rev. Mr Stewart of Killin, that in one of the
last cases so treated--and that only a few years ago--the patient was
found sane in the morning, and unbound; a dead relative, according to
the patient's own account, having entered the church during the night,
and loosened her both from the ropes that bound her body and the
delusions that warped her mind. It was a system of treatment by mystery
and terrorism that might have made some sane persons insane; and hence,
perhaps, conversely, some insane persons sane. Mr. Pennant tells us that
at Llandegla, in Wales, where similar rites were performed for the cure
of insanity, viz., purification in the sacred well, and forced detention
of the patient for a night in the church, under the communion-table, the
lunatics or their friends were obliged to leave a cock in the church if
he were a male, and a hen if she were a female--an additional
circumstance in proof of the AEsculapian type of the superstition. But
perhaps, after all, the whole is a medical or mythological belief, older
than Greece or Rome, and which was common to the whole Aryan or
Indo-European race in Asia before they sent off, westward, over Europe,
those successive waves of population that formed the nations of the Celt
and Teuton, of the Goth, and Greek, and Latin. The cock is still
occasionally sacrificed in the Highlands for the cure of epilepsy and
convulsions. A patient of mine found one, a few years ago, deposited in
a hole in the kitchen floor; the animal having been killed and laid down
at the spot where a child had, two or three days previously, fallen down
in a fit of convulsions."--See the _Medical Times and Gazette_ of Dec.
8, 1860, p. 549.]

[Footnote 222: See, for example, Kemble's work on the Anglo-Saxons, vol.
i. p. 528, for various Teutonic medical superstitions and cures.]

[Footnote 223: A very intelligent patient from the North Highlands, to
whom I happened lately to speak on this subject, has written out the
following instances that have occurred within her own knowledge:--"Twenty
years or more ago, in the parish of Nigg, Ross-shire, there was a lad of
fifteen ill with epilepsy. To cure him, his friends first tried the charm
of mole's blood. A plate was laid on the lad's head; the living mole was
hel