There's power in the blood!
The Celt's PAUL FITZPATRICK looks at the local tradition of 'cures' and where they came from.
When I was about 12, I sprained my ankle playing football. I was brought to John James North, a great elderly gentleman in Redhills village who played on the Annagh team which won the Junior Championship in 1945.
John James is well-known in the area for having 'the cure of the sprain’. He rubbed the ankle and prayed over it - I think I went three days in a row and, by the fourth day, the ankle was fine.
I remembered this when I stumbled across a fantastic radio documentary from 1975 recently, entitled Three Times Under The Ass’s Belly.
The programme was put together by the late RTÉ journalist Prionsias ” Conluain and he focused chiefly on the area around the Cavan-Leitrim Border, the same area that was home to Dr Patrick Logan, author of Making the Cure: A Look at Irish Folk Medicine.
” Conluain spoke to a man who was cured of shingles by a famous local man called Hughie Drumm, who was then over 80 years of age.
“I took a rash on my face,” explained the patient, who was not named, “and I went to the local doctor and he told me it was dermatitis... but some of the local lads told me I was a fool, that I should go out to Hughie Drumm that has the cure.
'So I just went down to the creamery, the co-op, got my unsalted butter – I was told I couldn’t go out without that. I went out to Hughie and he said 'you’re a very bad case with them’. He asked me did the doctor send me out and I said he did not.
“So he took the butter from me and went up to the room and he spent about a quarter of an hour preparing it and then he called me up to the room, he rubbed me up and down the side of my face with the butter.
“I had it from the top of my head to the point of my chin. And he rubbed and he rubbed for about 10 minutes at me. Then he gave me a drink of Lucozade. Before I went out I said to him 'it’ll be a long time before I shave that face’ – this was on a Tuesday.
“'No’, he said, 'you could happen to shave it Sunday’. And I shaved it on Monday.”
The narrator then spoke to Hughie who explained that the cure consisted of the unsalted butter, some prayers, and “a drop of my own blood”.
“It’d keep scourging ya and you’d go off your head,” said Hughie of the shingles. “But once that was rubbed, you were finished, no trouble, off you’d go.”
Conluain explained that the use of his own blood by the healer is a very ancient practice dating back to pagan times.
Every parish in this county, and probably across the country (although, maybe not - my brother met a nurse from south Kerry once and told her in passing about the practice and she was astounded) has its own individuals with the cure of something.
The most renowned of these was Philip McGovern, a farmer in Glangevlin, who died in 1913 and was famous across the country for having the cure of rabies, which was a scourge at a time due to mad dogs and foxes biting humans and livestock.
In McGovern’s obituary, it was noted that the cure was in his family since the reign of James 1, or over 300 years, “having been imparted in a dream to a McGovern while sleeping at the side of a stream in the ancient kingdom of Glan”.
“He was directed that having made the brew, he should go to an island in an adjoining lake and treat a young man who had been put there to die because he was suffering from the dreaded disease. Since then, it has always been held by the eldest male representative, the second being told soon before the death of the holder.”
In the 17th century, an ancestor of McGovern’s was said to have been offered £10,000 for the cure, which was rendered redundant as time went on and rabies was eradicated.
There are cures for everything, each method stranger than the next. Whooping cough in infants was said to be cured by passing a baby under the belly of an ass - or a white horse - three times, hence the title of that documentary.
For the cure of warts, the sufferer must touch the coat of a man who never saw his father, or sell them, or leave a bag of pebbles at a crossroads. The hands may be washed from a holy well or the water found in the hollow of a stone, or from a forge - but only if the forge water is stolen.
In the Belfast area, they bore a hole in a turnip, fill the hole with salt and then bury the lot in the ground for three weeks. When it’s disinterred, the remains are applied to the warts, which disappear.
It is amazing that the tradition has carried on in today’s cynical world. Shane Connaughton, in his 1994 book A Border Diary, talks about driving to Tempo in Fermanagh to get a cure for a bad back; he tied a string around it and after three days, took it off and burned it before it touched the ground.
Shane enquired as to whether it was all in the head, but was told the cure works just as well on a bullock or a horse with a sore back.
A 1928 article in The Anglo-Celt had the following to say on the matter.
“Though faith in these old-time 'cures’ seems to be dying out, there is still some confidence left in the simple remedies, a knowledge of which has been transmitted from ancient times. The efficacy of these old world cures is, in many instances, indisputable.”
Fast forward 63 years and letter writer, under the handle 'an interested Celt reader’, contributed the following to these pages.
“Sir – I read in The Anglo-Celt that a reader was looking for a cure for warts. My hands were full of warts and I got the cure.
Put the milk of the dandelion [sic] when it is in bloom on the warts. The skin gets black but the warts fade away for good.”
Andy McEntee also wrote at length in 1989 about the cures he had witnessed in his youth.
“The old cure for the mumps has to be seen to be believed,” he said. “Patient is taken to a byre, usually a cowshed, and a horse collar placed around his or her neck, before being paraded around the byre a few times.”
He saw that one on a number of occasions as a boy, and had first-hand experience of another.
“Ringworm, too, has its cures,” he wrote. “I remember being badly smitten by this nasty malady through contact with cattle and being taken down town to Tommy Brady’s licensed premises (now Blessing’s). Mr Brady, who had the cure, recited some prayers over my stricken head and there was the burning of something like brown paper.”
How does it work? Dr Logan knew. He gave his thoughts in an article in the Journal of the Longford Historical Society in 1980.
In 1939, when he was newly-qualified, he treated a man for burns. He later discovered the patient invoked a cure, which involved a plaster of “four parts by weight of mutton suet, and one part of bees wax”.
“This is an excellent method of treating a burn,” noted the doc. “It provides a closed dressing and the high melting point of the mutton fat will ensure that the dressing will not be messy.”
The same was the case for other cures.
“I heard of a young man who was suffering from sciatica. He was advised that the best treatment was bleeding. I was ignorant and proud and refused to bleed the lad, and I never got another chance. Later I learned that bleeding was advised as a treatment for sciatica in a famous 14th century text book the Rosa Anglim and was very popular in medieval Ireland.”
The diagnosis for shingles cannot be made until the spots break out. Rubbing it with a wedding ring or the blood of a ferret makes no odds - the trick is in the fact that the treatment is applied for nine days - “they all come in when the improvement has set in and the patient is on the way to recovery”.
Last word to Hughie Drumm, a busy man, it seems.
“Fr Kelly when he come here wouldn’t give in to it at all but it was no time till he come to the house for a niece of his own. He was in Kildallan here. There was so many coming, you couldn’t stick up to it.”
There you have it - there is power in the blood after all, if you believe in that sort of thing.