446 Miscellanea.
Fuaran an deididh for cure. The writer, in the sixties, was persuaded to do so.i
A cure for epilepsy consisted in the patient taking a drink of water out of a newly dug-up human skull. The writer, as a boy, was well acquainted with a young man who was taken by his father to a burying-place at the time of a funeral, and made to take a drink from a skull that had then been dug up. It was said that he never after that had a fit.
A friend of mine told me quite recently, that when he was a boy in the Shawbost School, early in the sixties, one of his class-fellows, as he sat beside him at the writing-desk, took a fit of epilepsy. On the following day, his father and a man well known to the writer, of local fame for curing that dreadful malady, came to the school- house. They opened the floor at the very spot at which the boy had the fit, and placed a living black cock, with clippings of the patient's hair and nails, in the opening made, covered it over, adjusted the floor to its usual level, and left the cock there. My friend said that he was in school with the boy for some time thereafter, and never saw or heard of his taking another fit. The unfortunate black cock has had a hard time of it, not only in the Highlands, but almost among all nations both barbarous and civilized.^
To cure a swollen uvula, the quack doctor took hold of a tuft of the patient's hair right above the uvula, and pulled it hard several times. The tuft of hair thus pulled was then tied round with a woollen thread, which is knotted several times. The
' There were three other wells in Lewis noted for curious qualities : one at Loch Carloway that never whitens linen ; St. Cowston's well at Garabost, which never boils any kind of meat, though it be kept on fire all day ; and St. Andrew's well at Shiadair, which was made a test to know whether a sick person were to die or not. One was sent with a wooden dish to bring some of the water of this well to the patient. If the dish, which was then laid softly upon the surface of the water, turned Deiseil (sun-ways), it was believed that the patient would recover, but if it turned Fiiathal (way-of- North), that he w^ould die. Vide Martin, Western Isles, p. 7.
^ '■^Sacrifice of a Cock. — At Contin a boy took ill one day in school. Not long after the schoolmaster called at the boy's home to ask for the patient. He entered quite unexpectedly. He found him in bed, and on looking more narrowly he saw a hole below the bed with a cock lying dead in it. An old woman, a neighbour, was standing near the bed with her hands stained with blood. Ross-shire." (MS. note of the late Rev. Dr. Gregor.) See also a previous communication by Mr. MacPhail, F. L., vi., i67.
