Anglo-Saxon charms and amulets were used by the monks of Glastonbury Abbey, who treated disease. In the “Leech book”[567] we find a holy amulet “against every evil rune lay,[568] and one full of elvish tricks, writ _for the bewitched man_, this writing in Greek letters: Alfa, Omega, IESVM, BERONIKH. Again, another dust and drink against a rune lay; take a bramble apple,[569] and lupins, and pulegium, pound them, then sift them, put them in a pouch, lay them under the altar, sing nine masses over them, put the dust into milk, drip thrice some holy water upon them, administer _this_ to drink at three hours.... If a mare[570] or hag ride a man, take lupins, and garlic, and betony, and frankincense, bind them on a fawn skin, let a man have the worts on him, and let him go into his house.” For typhus fever the patient is to drink of a decoction of herbs over which many masses have been sung, then say the names of the four gospellers and a charm and a prayer. Again, a man is to write in silence a charm, and silently put the words in his left breast and take care not to go indoors with the writing upon him, the words being EMMANUEL, VERONICA. Mr. Cockayne, the editor of _Saxon Leechdoms_, has pointed out that the greatest scientific men of antiquity, even those who set themselves against the prevailing medical superstitions of their times, and did their utmost to establish observation and experiment in opposition to speculation and old wives’ fables, were by no means liberated from a belief in magic and incantations. Chrysippus believed in amulets for quartan fevers.[571] Serapion, one of the chiefs of the Empiric school, prescribed crocodile’s dung and turtle’s blood in epilepsy. Soranos will not use incantations in the cure of diseases, yet he testifies that they were so employed. Pliny has an amulet for almost every disorder. He tells of a chief man in Spain who was cured of a disease by hanging purslane root round his neck; he teaches that an amulet of the seed of tribulus cures varicose veins; that the longest tooth of a black dog cures quartan fevers; or you may carry a wasp in your left hand or half a dozen other equally absurd things for the same purpose. A holly planted in the courtyard of a house keeps off witchcrafts; an herb picked from the head of a statue and tied with a red thread will cure headache, and so on.[572]