Gatherings From Spain

In minor cases of flirtation, where capital punishment is not called for, the offending party just gashes the cheek of the peccant one, and suiting the word to the action observes, “ya estas senalaā;” “Now you are marked.” This is precisely winkel quarte, the gash in the cheek, which is the only salve for the touchy honour of a German student, when called ein dummer junge, a stupid youth: —

“Und ist die quart gesessenSo ist der touche vergessen.”

Again, “Mira que te pego, mira que te mato,” “Mind I don’t strike thee – mind I don’t kill thee;” are playful fondling expressions of a Maja to a Majo. When this particular gash is only threatened, the Seville phrase was, “Mira que te pinto un jabeque;” “Take care that I don’t draw you a xebeck” (the sharp Mediterranean felucca). “They jest at wounds who never felt a scar,” but whenever this jabeque has really been inflicted the patient, ashamed of the stigma, and not having the face to show himself or herself, is naturally anxious to recover a good character and skin, which only one cosmetic, one sovereign panacea, can effect. This in Philip IV.’s time was cat’s grease which then removed such superfluous marks; while Don Quixote considered the oil of Apariccio to be the only cure for scratches inflicted by female or feline claws.

THE PARISH DOCTOR

In process of time, as science advanced, this was superseded by Unto del hombre, or man’s grease. Our estimable friend Don Nicolas Molero, a surgeon in high practice at Seville, assured us that previously to the French invasion he had often prepared this cataleptic specific, which used to be sold for its weight in gold, until, having been adulterated by unprincipled empirics, it fell into disrepute. The receipt of the balsam of Fierabras has puzzled the modern commentators of Don Quixote, but the kindness of Don Nicolas furnished us with the ingredients of this pommade divine, or rather mortale. “Take a man in full health who has been just killed, the fresher the better, pare off the fat round the heart, melt it over a slow fire, clarify, and put it away in a cool place for use.” The multitudinous church ceremonies and holidays in Spain, which bring crowds together, combined with the sun, wine, and women, have always ensured a supply of fine subjects.

In Spain, as elsewhere, the doctor mania is an expensive amusement, which the poor and more numerous class, especially in rural localities, seldom indulge in. Like their mules, they are rarely ill, and they only take to their beds to die. They have, it is true, a parish doctor, to whom certain districts are apportioned; when he in his turn succumbs to death, or is otherwise removed, the vacancy is usually announced in the newspapers, and a new functionary is often advertised for. His trifling salary is made up of payments in money and in kind, so much in corn and so much in cash; the leading principle is cheapness, and, as in our new poor-law, that proficient is preferred, who will contract to do for the greatest number at the smallest charge. His constituents decline sometimes to place full confidence in his skill or alacrity: they oftener do consult the barber, the quack, or curandero; for there is generally in orthodox Spain some charlatan wherever sword, rosary, pen, or lancet is to be wielded. The nostrums, charms, relics, incantations, &c., to which recourse is had, when not mediæval, are scarcely Christian; but the spiritual pharmacopœia of this land of Figaro is far too important to form the tail-piece of any chapter.

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 prone 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.

MIRACULOUS SANATIVE OILSCOSTUME 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 god, 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 herbæ, 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 scrap of San Frutos supplied at Segovia the loss of common sense; the Virgin of Oña 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 substitutes 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 Macassar oil cannot do much more. This graven image is at this moment the object of popular adoration, and disputes even with the worship of tobacco and money: countless are the mendicants, the halt, blind, and the lame, who cluster 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 mediæval superstition 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 passed 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 dentition. 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.

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 embassy.

The pious in antiquity raised temples to Minerva medica or Esculapius, as Spaniards do altars to Na. Señora 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 practitioners 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 masses to get his soul out of purgatory!

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 passed 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 masses and many in Spain have their own tutelars and refuges for the destitute; the kings and queens – whom God 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 Bassompierre in his dispatch: – “Les médecins en désespèrent depuis ce matin que l’on a commencé à user des remèdes spirituels, et faire transporter au palais l’image de N. D. de Athoche.” The patient died three days after the image was sent for.

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 God. 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 substitute 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 ladyship cannot conceive what an interest his or her Royal Highness the – takes in your ladyship’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 assuredly 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.

SPIRITUAL AIDS TO ACCOUCHEMENT

The Queens and Infantas of Spain have additional advantages. The palladium of the city of Tortosa is the cinta11 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 mass 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 sex, 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 ship 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 assistance 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 sex, 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.

BULL OF CRUSADE

Any account of Spanish doctors without a death, would be dull as a blank day with fox-hounds, although the medical man, differing from the sportsman, dislikes being in at it. He, the moment the fatal sisters three are running into their game, slips out, and leaves the last act to the clergyman: hence the Spanish saying, “When the priest begins, the physician ends.” It is related in the history of Don Quixote, that no sooner did the barber feel the poor knight’s wrist, than he advised him to attend to his soul and send for his confessor; and now, when a Castilian hidalgo takes to his bed, his friends pursue much the same course, nor does the catastrophe often differ. Lord Bacon, great in wise saws and instances, prayed that his death might come from Spain, because then it would be long on the journey; but he was not aware that the gentlemen in black formed an exception to the proverbial procrastination and dilatoriness of their fellow countrymen. As patients are soon dispatched, the law12 of the land subjects every physician to a fine of ten thousand maravedis, who fails after his first visit to prescribe confession; the chief object in sickness being, as the preamble states, to cure the soul; and so it is in Italy, where Gregory XVI. issued in 1845 three decrees; one to forbid railroads, another to prohibit scientific meetings, and a third to order all medical men to cease to attend invalids who had not sent for the priest and communicated after the third visit. In Spain, the first question asked in our time of the sick man was, not whether he truly repented of his sins, but whether he had got the Bull; and if the reply was in the negative, or his old nurse had omitted to send out and buy one, the last sacraments were denied to the dying wretch.

NECESSITY OF THE BULL

One Word on this wonderful Bull, that disarms death of its sting, and which, although few of our readers may ever have heard of it, plays a far more important part in the Peninsula than the quadruped does in the arena. Fastings are nowhere more strictly enjoined than here, where Lent represents the Ramadan of the Moslem. The denials have been mitigated to those faithful who have good appetites, by the paternal indulgence of their holy father at Rome, who, in consideration that it was necessary to keep the Spanish crusaders in fighting condition in order more effectually to crush the infidel, conceded to Saint Ferdinand the permission that his army might eat meat rations during Lent, provided there were any, for, to the credit of Spanish commissariats in general, few troops fast more regularly and religiously. The auspicious day on which the arrival is proclaimed of this welcome bull that announces dinner, is celebrated by bells merry as at a marriage feast; in the provincial cities mayors and corporations go to cathedral in what is called state, to the wonder of the mob and amusement of their betters at the resurrection of quiz coaches, the robes, maces, and obsolete trappings, by which these shadows of a former power and dignity hope to mark individual and collective insignificancy. A copy of this precious Bull cannot of course be had for nothing, and as it must be paid for, and in ready money, it forms one of the certain branches of public income. Although the proceeds ought to be expended on crusading purposes, Ferdinand VII., the Catholic King, and the only sovereign in possession of such a revenue, never contributed one mite towards the Christian Greeks in their recent struggle against the Turkish unbelievers.

DEATH-BED IN SPAIN

These bulls, or rather paper-money notes, are prepared with the greatest precautions, and constituted one of the most profitable articles of Spanish manufacture; a maritime war with England was dreaded, not so much from regard to the fasting transatlantic souls, as from the fear of losing, as Dr. Robertson has shown, the sundry millions of dollars and silver dross remitted from America in exchange for these spiritual treasures. They were printed at Seville, at the Dominican convent, the Porta cœli; but Soult, who now it appears is turning devotee, burnt down this gate of heaven, with its passports, and the presses. The bulls are only good for the year during which they are issued; after twelve months they become stale and unprofitable. There is then, says Blanco White, and truly, for we have often seen it, “a prodigious hurry to obtain new ones by all those who wish well to their souls, and do not overlook the ease and comfort of their stomachs.” A fresh one must be annually taken out, like a game-certificate, before Spaniards venture to sport with flesh or fowl, and they have reason to be thankful that it does not cost three pounds odd: for the sum of dos reales, or less than sixpence, man, woman, and child may obtain the benefit of clergy and cookery; but evil betides the uncertificated poacher, treadmills for life are a farce, perdition catches his soul. His certificate is demanded by the keeper of conscience when he is caught in the trap of sickness, and if without one, his conviction is certain; he cannot plead ignorance of the law, for a postscript and condition is affixed to all notices of jubilees, indulgences, and other purgatorial benefits, which are fixed on the church doors; and the language is as courteous and peremptory as in our popular assessed tax-paper – “Se ha de tener la bula:” you must have the bull; if you expect to derive any relief from these relaxations in purgatory, which all Spaniards most particularly do: hence the common phrase used by any one, when committing some little peccadillo in other matters, tengo mi bula para todo– I have got my bull, my licence to do any thing. The possession of this document acts on all fleshly comforts like soda on indigestion, indeed it neutralizes everything except heresy. As it is cheap, a Protestant resident, albeit he may not quite believe in its saving effects, will do well to purchase one for the sake of the peace of mind of his weaker brethren, for in this religion of forms and outer observances, more horror is felt by rigid Spaniards, at seeing an Englishman eating meat during a fast, than if he had broken all the ten commandments. The sums levied from the nation for these bulls is very large, although they are diminished before finally paid into the exchequer; some of the honey gathered by so many bees will stick to their wings, and the place of chief commissioner of the Bula is a better thing than that in the Excise or Customs of unbelieving countries.