One of the industries of the Foo-Chow beggars is the rearing of snakes, which are used by the druggists to prepare their medicines. Snake-wine is used as a febrifuge, and snake’s flesh is considered a nutritious diet for invalids. Skulls, paws, horns, and skins of many animals, as bears, bats, crocodiles and tigers, are used in medicine. For fever patients physicians prescribe a decoction of scorpions, while dysentery is treated by acupuncture of the tongue. Pigeon’s dung is the favourite medicine for women in pregnancy; and the water in which cockles have been boiled is prescribed for skin diseases, and for persons who are recovering from small-pox. Rat’s flesh is eaten as a hair-restorer, and human milk is given to aged persons as a restorative. Crab’s liver administered in decoction of pine shavings is used in a form of skin disease. In Gordon Cumming’s _Wanderings in China_, from which many of the above facts are taken, it is stated that “dried red-spotted lizard, silk-worm moth, parasite of mulberry trees, asses’s glue, tops of hartshorn, black-lead, white-lead, stalactite, asbestos, tortoise-shell, stag-horns and bones, dog’s flesh and ferns are all recommended as tonics.” Burnt straw, oyster shells, gold and silver leaf, and the bones and tusks of dragons are said to be astringent. These dragons’ bones are the fossil remains of extinct animals. Some of the medicines of standard Chinese works are selected purely on account of their loathsomeness, such as the ordure of all sorts of animals, from man down to goats, rabbits, and silk-worm, dried leeches, human blood, dried toads, shed skins of snakes, centipedes, tiger’s blood, and other horrors innumerable hold a conspicuous place in the Chinese pharmacopœia. Nor, says Gordon Cumming, are these the worst. The physicians say that some diseases are incurable save by a broth made of human flesh cut from the arm or thigh of a living son or daughter of the patient.[309] The same author tells us that a young girl who so mutilated herself to save her mother’s life was specially commended in the _Official Gazette_ of Peking for July 5th, 1870. Medicines prepared from the eyes and vitals of the dead are supposed to be efficacious. Leprosy is believed to be curable by drinking the blood of a healthy infant. Dr. Macarthy and Staff-Surgeon Rennie were present at an execution in Peking, when they saw the executioner soak up the blood of the decapitated criminal with large balls of pith, which he preserved. These are dried and sold to the druggists under the name of “shue-man-tou” (blood-bread), which is prescribed for a disease called “chong-cheng,” which Dr. Rennie supposed to be pulmonary consumption.[310]