My Ears Are Bent by Joseph Mitchell

Author:Joseph Mitchell [Mitchell, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-75811-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-11-10T05:00:00+00:00

Powdered Human Brains

According to the latest information from the Department of Health, it is impossible to kill germs by tooting at the new moon with a ram’s horn. However, conjure doctors are not interested in the latest information from the Department of Health. Even the poorest conjure man works on the assumption that he knows twenty times more than the finest medical man in the world.

Using a prescription he says he got from one of the demons who dwell beneath the three-pronged root of the world-mountain, a conjure doctor may wrap seven lengths of fresh snakeskins around the middle of a person suffering from stomach ulcers, telling him it is a sure cure for what ails him, and the treatment, of course, will have no effect on the sufferer, except that it will make him smell rather unusual.

A journeyman voodoo doctor feels competent to treat any disease or ailment that can possibly afflict any animal—man, mule or monster. Consequently, voodoo is a serious menace to the health of a community.

Little damage would be done, perhaps, if conjure men confined their medicine making to lovesicknesses—bringing two people together, for example, or making a man look O.K. in the eyes of the object of his affections through the use of Compelling powder or conjure bags filled with Adam and Eve roots or some such mess. Quite often conjure men give advice to the lovesick as good as the run-of-the-mill advice in lovelorn columns in the newspapers.

Such work, however, does not satisfy the conjure men. They want to prescribe for and treat people suffering with everything from tuberculosis to tertiary alcoholism. And, usually, the more disastrous the affliction the screwier the remedy. They will give rat’s blood to people suffering with cancer and gooferdust to epileptics.

The voodoo doctors and their voluntary or unconscious allies—the herb and root quacks and unscrupulous druggists—have wrecked the health of thousands. The Department of Health and the American Social Hygiene Association have found scores of voodoo doctors treating diseases.

The stuff they prescribe may not actually be dangerous in itself, although it often is, but their phony, often ghastly medicines always keep patients from receiving treatment that will cure them. A member of the medical staff of the Department of Health told a harrowing story about a medicine prescribed by one quack.

“A friend of mine, a doctor, was looking up a telephone number in a dingy drugstore in Central Harlem,” said this man, “and while he was there a customer came in and asked the clerk for some powdered human brain, about $2 worth.

“Without a moment’s hesitation the clerk stepped behind a partition in the rear of the store and quickly returned with a small folded paper, the kind in which cold powders are put up. The man paid for it and walked out.

“My friend decided it would be worth $2 to find out about the stuff. He asked the clerk if he had any more for sale and said, ‘What’s it good for?’ The clerk said it was simply wonderful for nervousness and sick headaches and syphilis and other diseases of the brain.

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