Spunk-Water & Psychoanalysis

Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn had definite ideas on the best way to cure warts. Tom favored "spunk-water" (rain water in a rotten tree stump). One of Huck's favorite prescriptions required a dead cat: "Why, you take your cat and go and get in the graveyard 'long about midnight when somebody wicked has been buried; and when it's midnight a devil will come, or maybe two or three . . . and when they're taking the feller away, you heave your cat after 'em and say, 'Devil follow corpse, cat follow devil, warts follow cat, I'm done with ye!' That'll fetch any wart."

Britain's Dr. William Samuel Inman, eye surgeon and psychoanalyst, has some ideas on curing warts that might have come right out of the Mark Twain pharmacopoeia. In the issue of Lancet that reached the U.S. last week, Inman told of a 13 -year-old boy who came to him with ten warts on his thumb. Dr. Inman told him to touch the tip of his tongue to each wart every morning because saliva is peculiarly poisonous to warts, but not to tell anybody. The warts went away.

Inman tried the same remedy on an eight-year-old boy, but it failed because he told somebody. So Inman instructed him to "steal a potato from his mother's store, halve it, touch each wart with the raw surface, 'and then bury the potato in the backyard by the light of the full moon -- all in the greatest secrecy." Those warts went away, too. The doctor cured an adult of a shin wart by having him apply saliva with his finger.

How do the charms work? Emotional impulses, Inman thinks, may cure as well as cause warts. Dr. Inman nods knowingly at folklore stories of people getting rid of eyelid styes by rubbing them with wedding rings. He checked 158 patients, found that 92% of those with styes and 80% of those with tarsal cysts (tumors of the eyelid) had "an exceptional interest in birth." Just why such concern should affect eyelids, .Dr. Inman is not sure. But he reasons that "serious chronic inflammations in the body generally might be beneficially influenced by systematic psychoanalysis."

A baffling epidemic in Dundee was reported in the same issue of the Lancet. Women were turning up at doctors' offices suffering from bullous erythema (reddish blisters) on their legs. The doctors wondered: Was it due to chemical burns? To a new skin disease? Dr. John Kinnear, of the Dundee Royal Infirmary, discovered and pondered the fact that all the women had been riding the same tram line. Dr. Kinnear inspected and confirmed a suspicion: bedbugs.

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