In the 19th century, the West Country saw a resurgence of ‘cunning folk’ – practitioners of folk medicine, particularly in rural areas.
Despite witchcraft laws being repealed in 1736 and the rise of science following the Enlightenment, the belief in practical magic remained strong, and unorthodox medical practitioners were still being called on.
In Dorset, possibly the most famous of these practitioners was the self-proclaimed ‘Toad Doctor’, Dr Buckland from Pelham. His work was detailed by Henry Colley March, a prolific writer on archaeology and folklore, who became a member of the Dorset Natural History and Antiquarian Field Club.
In 1897, Colley March collated folklore stories from across Dorset and published them in a journal, including accounts of the ‘toad doctor’. He described how the doctor would hang toads around the necks, beneath the clothing, of those suffering from the ‘King’s Evil’. This was scrofula, a tubercular infection of the lymph nodes of the neck, often contracted through drinking unpasteurised milk from cows infected with bovine tuberculosis — a not uncommon occurrence at the time.
During the 1830s, a great gathering called Dr Buckland’s Fair took place at Pulham in May. Its exact date was determined by the phases of the moon.
‘The doctor, dressed in white, was assisted by his three daughters, also dressed in white, and they attended to his patients, who came from far and near,’ records the Women’s Institute book Dorset Up Along and Down Along, 1935.
‘His method was certainly unusual, for he kept toads which he used alive, hanging them under his patients’ clothes.
‘As long as the toads twitched and moved, the cure progressed. As to what happened if the toad died before the cure was complete, the story does not relate.’
Grim cures
Dr Buckland’s success was not accidental. Doctors and medicine had to be paid for, and before the 1875 Public Health Act – which required councils to provide clean water, sewage systems and hygiene standards – falling unwell was a dangerous occupation unless you had money. Folk medicine operated on the principle of ‘sympathetic magic’, in which disease could be transferred to an animal or cured by harnessing an animal’s perceived properties.
This belief was enhanced by the prohibitive costs of university-trained physicians and the mistrust of orthodox medical treatments, which often proved fatal.
Deep-seated rural reliance on traditional supernatural remedies contrasted sharply with treatments such as bloodletting, blistering and heavy doses of mineral poisons such as arsenic or mercury, favoured by ‘real’ doctors. Survival rates were also grim, and scientific medicines often failed to provide cures for disfiguring conditions, which folk practitioners were believed to be able to treat.
Of course, the reality is that these unorthodox treatments were usually just as ineffective as those practised by trained doctors, but it was all that many rural communities could trust and believe in. The mid-19th century saw the peak of the ‘toad doctor’ era, and by the end of the 1800s they were on the decline, as the law opened access to improving medical treatments and the popularity of folk magic waned.The ‘toad doctor’ of Dorset had had his day, as the rise of free or subsidised cottage and voluntary hospitals encouraged a growing trust in orthodox medicine, regardless of wealth or status.
by James Brinsford
