Weird medicine - jaundice and birds

[YTMezoan]

Hi -

This sounds a bit weird, but that only means that there's no better place than SD for asking it. I was once told that jaundice was sometimes treated by rubbing a series of birds over the afflicted's body in the region of the liver. The birds would then die, but the patient would be cured of his disease.
Has anyone heard of this before?

Thanks.

[Ca3799]

I've never heard of this, but cannot imagine any reason why it would work at all.

[herman_and_bill]

I wonder why they are still using black light in the hospital instead of these new discoverys?

[Duck Duck Goose]

It actually sounds like an old folk remedy, or something from Ancient Rome.

Found this, FWIW.

http://www.bartleby.com/196/pages/page16.html

The ancients held that if a person suffering from jaundice looked sharply at a stone-curlew, and the bird looked steadily at him, he was cured of the disease. “Such is the nature,” says Plutarch, “and such the temperament of the creature that it draws out and receives the malady which issues, like a stream, through the eyesight.” So well recognised among birdfanciers was this valuable property of the stone-curlew that when they had one of these birds for sale they kept it carefully covered, lest a jaundiced person should look at it and be cured for nothing. The virtue of the bird lay not in its colour but in its large golden eye, which naturally drew out the yellow jaundice. Pliny tells of another, or perhaps the same, bird, to which the Greeks gave their name for jaundice, because if a jaundiced man saw it, the disease left him and slew the bird.

[Broomstick]

It would not surprise me if this had a connection to Voudoun/Santeria/Ife where birds may be rubbed on the body of a sick or "cursed" person to draw off the "poison". Those birds do die - but it's because they become animal sacrifices

Does it work? Believers swear by it, but many of the rest of us remain skeptical.