I’ve heard of a lot of weird treatments but has anyone heard of slaughtering chickens and laying them on top of a person’s head. The book I’m reading, “Tall Towers” is set in about 1700 New France (Montreal). It’s just a minor part of the book but I found it very strange. The doctor says “I’ve never had to kill more than 10 hens” suggesting that this treatment works everytime. The patient had some general illness like the flu.
I would appreciate any info regarding this type of treatment.
I don’t know how many fresh chickens I’d let a doctor split on my head before I stopped calling the doctor, but “fewer than ten” sounds like a safe bet. I mean, it’s a poultice of sorts, I suppose…
Wouldn’t it be a poultry-ice?
It could also mean that by the time ten hens are used the patient is either recovered or dead. It seems to me that I have read about using chickens or pigeons in this way before in some novel or the other.
It’s safe to assume the medicinal chickens were cooked into, that’s right, chicken soup after the doctor left. My own doctor recommends chicken soup for sinus trouble. “Not just because I’m Jewish,” he says, but because the New England Journal of Medicine published a paper showing that it works. Now, to honor tradition…
It could’n hoit!
I haven’t heard of that one, but there are certain modern day religions (Santaria, most notably) that involve sacrificing a chicken or other bird, and then brushing the bird’s wings over a sick person or a house’s walls, or some other place that needs purification or blessing.
employing teh interwebs now…
I’ve heard it works, but only if you’re feeling fowl.
- SS