The patients were bound to venerated crosses at evening, to be released as cured in the morning.[639] They were chained fast to stones in various churches; they were dipped into holy wells—this custom lasted in Cornwall to modern times; and they were sent as pilgrims to shrines,[640] at some of which they underwent a regular course of treatment; music was often an important element.[641] And remedies far more drastic might be provided, which relied not so much upon the power of the saints as on the human weakness of the devils. Thus, scattered among the recipes for herbs and all the indescribable filthy mixtures which were advocated for insanity,[642] we come across the following prescription, the effects of which would prove anything but imaginary:—“In case a man be a lunatic, take skin of a mereswine or porpoise, work it into a whip, swinge the man well therewith, soon he will be well. Amen.” At one monastery the lunatics in the charge of the monks are said to have received ten lashes every day.[643] The insane have been flogged for various reasons:—(1) Superstitiously, to drive out the devil, and even to scare away a disease; (2) therapeutically, because pain and shock would often subdue the ravings of the patients, although only temporarily; (3) instinctively, as a relief to their keepers’ feelings. The medical and the brutal whippings we shall meet again later on, long after devil-driving had been abandoned, though it prevailed through Christendom for probably over sixteen hundred years. To understand it we must turn aside to savages. Primitive peoples,[644] like children, _personified_ everything. Disease appeared to be a sort of personal entity—like that deceitful dream[645] Zeus sent to Agamemnon—a “thing” “to be drawn out in an invisible form, and burnt in the fire or thrown into the water.” A foe invisible, but yet so human in its limitations as to be stopped by thorns placed in its path.[646] And if all manner of physical ailments were looked upon as being, or, at any rate, as emanating from personal demons, much more would such a fearful and mysterious affliction as insanity be held to indicate a devil’s presence and immediate handiwork.[647] Moreover, to the primitive mind, the demons of all sorts were much too near, too vividly conceived, too real, too commonplace, to be regarded as spiritual beings within the modern meaning of the word. They were conceived as obviously living and moving about,[648] and therefore as being human in their character. Thus among savages “the souls of the dead are thought susceptible of being beaten, hurt, and driven like any other living creatures,”[649] and demons could be hunted out of the houses and scared away to woods and outer darkness.[650]