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. [Sidenote: 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. [Sidenote: MIRACULOUS SANATIVE OILS.] [Sidenote: COSTUME OF CONVALESCENTS.]