Also called Wart charming, Buying warts, Wart knots
A family of British and Appalachian folk charms in which a wart is touched with an object that is then buried, tied off or given away, so that as the object rots the wart fades. Folk tradition only; see a doctor or dermatologist about skin growths.
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Take care: Folk tradition only, not medical treatment: see a doctor about any growth that bleeds, changes colour or shape, or spreads, since some skin cancers can look like warts. Do not tie string tightly on skin or cut at warts yourself.
Randolph recorded wart doctors who tied a knot in a string for each wart and hid or buried the string, along with charmers who simply looked at the warts, counted them, or bought them for a penny. Many wart doctors refused payment, believing a fee spoiled the power.
Uses: string, a penny
Brown's collectors gathered hundreds of wart cures from North Carolina families: rubbing warts with a potato, a bean, a dishrag or a stolen piece of meat and burying it, or touching them with pebbles placed in a bag and dropped at a crossroads for someone else to pick up.
Uses: potato, bean, dishrag, pebbles
In English villages a known charmer, often an older person who had the gift handed down, would touch or count a child's warts, sometimes buying them for a coin, and say nothing more. Davies describes charmers as part of the wider world of unofficial healers who worked alongside doctors well into the twentieth century.
Uses: a small coin
Wart charming is one of the longest lived folk cures in the English-speaking world. Warts are caused by a virus and many clear up on their own within months, which helped the charms keep their reputation. Folklorists working in the twentieth century found the cures almost everywhere they asked, from Cornish fishing towns to Ozark hollows, usually passed from a grandparent or a neighbour who was known to have the touch.
Vance Randolph, who collected in the Missouri and Arkansas Ozarks from the 1920s, described wart doctors as among the most common folk healers he met. The Frank C. Brown Collection, edited for its medical volumes by Wayland D. Hand, catalogued hundreds of North Carolina wart cures. Most share one idea: the wart is passed into something that decays, is buried or is carried away.
A Roman fever charm in which the word ABRACADABRA is written in a shrinking triangle, one letter lost per line, so the illness shrinks with it. A historical charm only; anyone with a fever should see a doctor.
A short Old High German verse in which gods heal a horse's sprained leg, joining bone to bone and blood to blood. Recited today as a folk blessing for mending; it is not medical care, so see a doctor or vet for any injury.
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