A Legend of Norham by John Lang — Read

In the days, now happily remote, when folks, provided as for a picnic, laboriously travelled great distances in order to be present at the execution of some unhappy wretch; in the days when harmless old women, whose chief fault may probably have been that they were poor and friendless, and perhaps by age and privation rendered little better than half-witted, were baited, and dragged by an ignorant and credulous populace to a fiery or to a watery death, there survived in Scotland yet another barbarous custom not unworthy to take rank with witch-burning. It was a custom so pitiless and revolting that the mind shrinks from its contemplation, for if its victims were not necessarily frail old women, they were yet human beings guilty of no crime, innocent perhaps of all but misfortune.

The study of medicine in those days was in its infancy, and many were the strange virtues attributed to certain herbs, vast the powers claimed for certain things in nature. Aconitum (or wolf's-bane) for example, was reputed to "prevail mightily against the bitings of Scorpions, and is of such force that if the Scorpion pass by where it groweth, and touch the same, presently he becometh dull, heavy, and senseless, and if the same Scorpion by chance touch the White Hellebore, he is presently delivered from his drowiness. " A certain root, too, was of sovereign efficacy in the prevention of rabies in human beings who had been bitten by a mad dog. In Gerard's _Herbal_, a medical work published in 1596 -- "Gathered by John Gerarde of London, Master in Chirurgerie" -- it is laid down that "the root of the Briar-bush is a singular remedy found out by oracle against the biting of a mad dog. " Then, as now, rabies was regarded with a sickening dread, but in that remote day there had arisen no Pasteur, and dread too frequently degenerated into panic, and panic, as it ever does, revealed itself in brutality.