Part 16 (1/2)

[Sidenote: SPIRITUAL REMEDIES FOR THE BODY.]

CHAPTER XVIII.

Spanish Spiritual Remedies for the Body--Miraculous Relics--Sanative Oils--Philosophy of Relic Remedies--Midwifery and the Cinta of Tortosa--Bull of Crusade.

The Reverend Dr. Fernando Castillo, an esteemed Spanish author and teacher, remarks, in his luminous Life of St. Domenick, that Spain has been so bountifully provided by heaven with fine climate, soil, and extra number of saints, that his countrymen are p.r.o.ne to be idle and to neglect such rare advantages. Certainly they may not dig and delve so deeply as is done in lands less favoured, but the reproach of omitting to call on Hercules to do their work, or of not making the most of Santiago in any bodily dilemma, is a somewhat too severe reproach: nowhere in case of sickness have the saving virtues of relics, and the adjurations of holy monks, been more implicitly relied on.

[Sidenote: MIRACULOUS SANATIVE OILS.]

[Sidenote: COSTUME OF CONVALESCENTS.]

As our learned readers well know, the medical practice of the ancients was, as that of the Orientals still is, more peculiar than scientific.

When disease was thought to be a divine punishment for sin, it was held to be wicked to resist by calling in human aid: thus Asa was blamed, and thus Moslems and Spaniards resign themselves to their fate, distrusting, and very properly, their medical men: ”Am I a G.o.d, to kill or make alive?” In the large towns, in these days of progress, some patients may ”suffer a recovery” according to European practice; but in the country and remote villages,--and we speak from repeated personal experience,--the good old reliance on relics and charms is far from exploded; and however Dr. Sangrado and Philip III., whose decrees on medical matters yet adorn the Spanish statutes at large, deplore the introduction of perplexing chemistry, mineral therapeuticals still remain a considerable dead letter, as the church has transferred the efficacy of faith from spiritual to temporal concerns, and gun-shot wounds. Even Ponz, the Lysons of Spain, and before the Inquisition was abolished, ventured to express surprise at the number of images ascribed to St. Luke, who, says he, was not a sculptor, but a physician, whence possibly their sanative influence. The old Iberians were great herbalist doctors; thus those who had a certain plant in their houses, were protected, as a blessed palm branch now wards off lightning. They had also a drink made of a hundred herbs, and hence called _centum herbae_, a _bebida de cien herbas_, which, like Morison's vegetable pills, cured every possible disease, and was so palatable that it was drunk at banquets, which modern physic is not; moreover, according to Pliny, they cured the gout with flour, and relieved elongated uvulas by hanging purslain round the patient's throat. So now the _curas y curanderos_, country curates and quacks, furnish charms and incantations, just as Ulysses stopped his bleeding by cantation: a medal of Santiago cures the ague, a handkerchief of the Virgin the ophthalmia, a bone of San Magin answers all the purposes of mercury, a sc.r.a.p of San Frutos supplied at Segovia the loss of common sense; the Virgin of Ona destroyed worms in royal Infantes, and her sash at Tortosa delivers royal Infantas. Every Murcian peasant believes that no disease can affect him or his cattle, if he touches them with the cross of Caravaca, which angels brought from heaven and placed on a red cow. When we were last at Manresa, the worthy man who showed the cave in which Loyola the founder of the Jesuits did penance for a year, increased an honest livelihood by the sale of its pulverized stones, that were swallowed by the faithful in cases in which an English doctor would prescribe Dover's or James's powders. Every province, not to say parish, has its own tutelar saint and relic, which are much honoured and resorted to in their local jurisdiction, and very little thought of out of it, their power to cure having been apparently granted to them by Santiago, as a commission to commit is by Queen Victoria to a magistrate, whose authority does not extend beyond the county bounds. Zaragoza was admirably provided: a portion of the liver of Santa Engracia was anciently resorted to, in cases where blue pill would be beneficial; the oil of her lamps, which never smoked the ceilings, cured _lamparones_, or tumours in the neck, while that which burnt before the _Virgen del Pilar_, or the image of the Virgin which came down from heaven on a pillar, restored lost legs; Cardinal de Retz mentions in his Memoirs having seen a man whose wooden subst.i.tutes became needless when the originals grew again on being rubbed with it; and this portent was long celebrated by the Dean and Chapter, as well it deserved, by an especial holiday, for Maca.s.sar oil cannot do much more.

This graven image is at this moment the object of popular adoration, and disputes even with the wors.h.i.+p of tobacco and money: countless are the mendicants, the halt, blind, and the lame, who cl.u.s.ter around her shrine, as the equally afflicted ancients, with whom physicians were in vain, did around that of Minerva; and it must be confessed that the cures worked are almost incredible.

It may be said that all this is a raking up of remnants of mediaeval superst.i.tion and darkness, and it is probable that the medical men in Madrid and the larger towns, and especially those who have studied at Paris, do not place implicit confidence in these spiritual, nor indeed in any other purely Spanish remedies; but their tried medicinal properties are set forth at length in scores of Spanish county and other histories which we have the felicity to possess, all of which have pa.s.sed the scrutinizing ordeal of clerical censors, and have been approved of as containing nothing contrary to the creed of the Church of Rome or good customs; nor can it be permitted that a church which professes to be always one, the same, and the only true one, should at its own convenience ”turn its back on itself,” and deny its own drugs and doctrines. Nothing is set down here which was not perfectly notorious under the reign of Ferdinand VII.; and whatever the doctors of physic or theology may now disbelieve in Spain, more reliance is still placed, in the rural districts, where foreign civilization has not penetrated, on miracles than on medicines.

We have often and often seen little children in the streets dressed like Franciscan monks--Cupids in cowls--whose pious parents had vowed to clothe them in the robes of this order, provided its sainted founder preserved their darlings during measles or dent.i.tion. Nothing was more common than that women, nay, ladies in good society, should appear for a year in a particular religious dress, called _el habito_, or with some religious badge on their sleeves in token of similar deliverance.

[Sidenote: CURE OF SOULS.]

One instance in our time amused all the tertulias of Seville, who maliciously attributed the sudden relief which a fair high-born unmarried invalid experienced from an apparent dropsical complaint to causes not altogether supernatural; _Pues, Don Ricardo_, ”and so, Master Richard,” would her friends of the same age and rank often say, ”you are a stranger; go and ask dearest _Esperanza_ why she wears the Virgin of Carmel; come back and let us know her story, and we will tell you the real truth.” _Vaya! vaya! Don Ricardo, usted es muy majadero_,--”Go to, Master Richard, your Grace is an immense bore,” replied the penitent, if she suspected the authors and motive of the emba.s.sy.

The pious in antiquity raised temples to Minerva medica or Esculapius, as Spaniards do altars to _Na. Senora de los Remedios_, our Lady of the Remedies, and to San Roque, whose intervention renders ”sound as a roach,” a proverb devised in his honour by our ancestors, who, before the Reformation, trusted likewise to him; and both thought, if Cicero is to be credited, that these tutelars did _at least_ as much as the doctor. Alas! for the patient credulity of mankind, which still gulps down such medicinal quackery as all this, and which long will continue to do so even were one of the dead to rise from the grave, to deprecate the absurd treatment by which he and so many have been sacrificed.

However, by way of compensation, the saving the _soul_ has been made just as primary a consideration in Spain as the curing the _body_ has been in England. These relics, charms, and amulets represent our patent medicines; and the wonder is how any one in Great Britain can be condemned to death in this world, or how any one in the Peninsula can be doomed to perdition in the next: possibly the panaceas are in neither case quite specific. Be that as it may, how numerous and well-appointed are the churches and convents there, compared to the hospitals; how amply provided the relic-magazine with bones and spells, when compared to the anatomical museums and chemists' shops; again, what a flock of holy pract.i.tioners come forth _after_ a Spaniard has been stabbed, starved, or executed, not one of whom would have stirred a step to save an army of his countrymen when alive; and what coppers are now collected to pay ma.s.ses to get his soul out of purgatory!

[Sidenote: PHILOSOPHY OF RELICS.]

Beware, nevertheless, gentle Protestant reader, of dying in Spain, except in Cadiz or Malaga, where, if you are curious in Christian burial, there is snug lying for heretics; and for your life avoid being even sick at Madrid, since if once handed over to the faculty make thy last testament forthwith, as, if the judgment pa.s.sed on their own doctors by Spaniards be true, Esculapius cannot save thee from the crows: avoid the Spanish doctors therefore like mad dogs, and throw their physic after them.

The ma.s.ses and many in Spain have their own tutelars and refuges for the dest.i.tute; the kings and queens--whom G.o.d preserve!--have their own especial patroness by prerogative, in the image of the Virgin of Atocha at Madrid, which they and the rest of the royal family visit every Sunday in the year when in royal health. No sooner was the sovereign taken dangerously ill, and the court physicians at a loss what to do, as sometimes is the case even in Madrid, than the image used to be brought to his bedside; witness the case of Philip III., thus described by Ba.s.sompierre in his dispatch:--”Les medecins en desesperent depuis ce matin que l'on a commence a user des _remedes spirituels_, et faire transporter au palais _l'image_ de N. D. de Athoche.” The patient died three days after the image was sent for.

[Sidenote: SPANISH MIDWIFERY.]

Although neither priest nor physician might credit the sanative properties of rags and relics, they gladly called them in, for if the case then went wrong, how could mortal man be expected to succeed when the supernatural remedy had failed? All inquests in awkward cases are hushed up by ascribing the death to the visitation of G.o.d. Again, if a relic does not always cure it rarely kills, as calomel has been known to do. This interruptive principle, one distinct from human remedies, is admitted by the church in the prayers for sick persons; and where faith is sincere, even relics must offer a powerful moral medical cordial, by acting on the imagination, and giving confidence to the patient. This chance is denied to the poor Protestant, nay, even to a newly-converted tractarian, for truly, to believe in the efficacy of a monkish bone, the lesson must have been learnt in the nursery. Their subst.i.tute in Lutheran lands, in partibus infidelium, is found in laudanum, news, and gossip; the latter being the grand specific by which Sir Henry kept scores of dowagers alive, to the despair of jointure-paying sons, from marquises down to baronets; and how much real comfort is conveyed by the gentle whisper, ”Your ladys.h.i.+p cannot conceive what an interest his or her Royal Highness the ---- takes in your ladys.h.i.+p's convalescence!”

The _form_ of the moral restorative will vary according to climate, creeds, manners, &c.; it is to the _substance_ alone that the philosophical physician will look. That chord must be touched, be it what it may, to which the pulse of the patient will respond; nor, provided he is recovered, do the means much signify.

One word only on Spanish midwifery. There is a dislike to male accoucheurs, and the midwife, or _comadre_, generally brings the Spaniard into the world by the efforts of nature and the aid of _manteca de puerco_, or hogs' lard, a launching appropriate enough to a babe, who, if it survives to years of discretion, will a.s.suredly love bacon.

The newly-born is then wrapped up, like an Egyptian mummy, and is carefully protected from fresh air, soap, and water; an amulet is then hung round its neck to disarm the evil eye, or some badge of the Virgin is to ensure good luck: thus the young idea is taught from the cradle, what errors are to be avoided and what safeguards are to be clung to, lessons which are seldom forgotten in after-life. Without entering further into baby details, the scanty population of the Peninsula may in some measure be thus accounted for. Parturition also is frequently fatal; in ordinary cases the midwife does very well, but when a difficulty arises she loses her head and patient. It is in these trying moments, as in the critical operations of the kitchen, that a male artiste is preferable.

[Sidenote: SPIRITUAL AIDS TO ACCOUCHEMENT.]

The Queens and Infantas of Spain have additional advantages. The palladium of the city of Tortosa is the _cinta_[11] or girdle, which the Virgin, accompanied by St. Peter and St. Paul, brought herself from heaven to a priest of the cathedral in 1178; an event in honour of which a ma.s.s is still said every second Sunday in October. The gracious gift was declared authentic in 1617, by Paul V., and to justify his infallibility it works every sort of miracle, especially in obstetric cases; it is also brought out to defend the town on all occasions of public calamity, but failed in the case of Suchet's attack. This girdle, more wonderful than the cestus of Venus, was conveyed in 1822, by Ferdinand VII.'s command, in solemn procession to Aranjuez, in order to facilitate the accouchement of the two Infantas, and as Lucina when duly invoked favoured women in travail, so their Royal Highnesses were happily delivered, and one of the babes then born, is the husband of Isabel II. For humbler Castilian women, when pregnant, a spiritual remedy was provided by the canons of Toledo, who took the liveliest interest in many of the cases. The grand entrance to the cathedral had thirteen steps, and all females who ascended and descended them ensured an early and easy time of it. No wonder therefore, when these steps were reduced to the number of seven, that the greatest possible opposition should have been made by the fair s.e.x, married and unmarried. All these things of Spain are rather Oriental; and to this day the Barbary Moors have a cannon at Tangiers by which a Christian s.h.i.+p was sunk, and across this their women sit to obtain an easy delivery. In all ages and countries where the science of midwifery has made small progress, it is natural that some spiritual a.s.sistance should be contrived for perils of such inevitable recurrence as childbirth. The panacea in Italy was the girdle of St. Margaret, which became the type of this _Cinta_ of Tortosa, and it was resorted to by the monks in all cases of difficult parturition. It was supposed to benefit the s.e.x, because when the devil wished to eat up St. Margaret, the Virgin bound him with her sash, and he became tame as a lamb. This sash brought forth sashes also, and in the 17th century had multiplied so exceedingly, that a traveller affirmed ”if all were joined together, they would reach all down Cheapside;” but the natural history of relics is too well known to be enlarged upon.

[Sidenote: BULL OF CRUSADE.]