Toads as Medicine

1901

"Out of the queer use of a common creature regarded as most potent in old time medicine there came the most surprising and nearly the most important of inventions," says Harvey Sutherland in Ainslee's.

"Every schoolboy knows that a toad can cause warts or make the cow give bloody milk, but not everybody knows that toads are also powerfully medicinal. It is a fact. Martin Luther says so. These are his very words: 'Experience has proved the toad to be endowed with valuable qualities. If you run a stick through three toads, and, after having dried them in the sun, apply them to any pestilent humor, they draw out the poison, and the malady will disappear.'

"Pope Adrian always carried a bag about his neck containing dried toad, pearl, coral, gum tragacanth, smaragd and other articles of junk. It did him a power of good, he said. It was all that kept him up. And lest you think that they only did that hundreds of years ago, I want to say here that when my father was a boy and suffered from quinsy they used to tie live frogs about his throat. The frogs nearly clawed the hide off. They did not cure the quinsy, but that's a detail."