Ancient cures and charms were a gift, they were not scientific, and many are still being performed today. They relied largely on faith, be it in God, in the remedy itself, or in the person administering it.

Cures were available for all sorts of ailments. They often belonged to one particular person and would be passed on to a chosen successor instructed to use them wisely.

It was believed that some people had natural healing powers, for example, a seventh son or daughter, or best of all a seventh son of a seventh son. Also a child born after its father had died had the power to cure some illnesses.

A woman who married a man with the same surname, and to whom she was otherwise not related, would have been thought to have the cure for whooping cough. Recently someone in County Tyrone, whose parents coincidentally had the same surname, told me that when her mother first married, people would turn up at the door seeking the cure and she had no idea what they were talking about. When administered, the whopping cough cure must have been rather a strange spectacle as it entailed the sick infant being passed under a donkey's belly and over its back three times.

There were several different methods employed in curing mumps, a common childhood illness. These included the patient wearing the blinkers from a donkey and being led to a river where the water must be drunk direct, or across a south-flowing stream, or three times around a pig-sty. Another porcine cure for the illness involved the child having its head rubbed against the back of a pig while a phrase was called out in Irish "muc, muc, seo dhuit do leici" meaning "pig, pig, here are your mumps". The unfortunate pig would then catch the disease.

To cure childhood convulsions the clippings of the hair and nails of the infant were tied up in a linen cloth and placed under its cradle.

A treatment available for skin cancer was almost as dangerous as the disease itself. This relied on the use of a poultice, of which the main constituent was arsenic, being placed on the growth. The plaster caused agonising pain as it destroyed the tissue and many sufferers could not endure the pain or persist with the treatment. If the plaster was not removed then within two weeks it would fall off naturally taking a large part of the growth with it. Because of the risks involved in using a proscribed poison, coupled with the advances in modern treatment for cancer, this practice has now completely died out.

On a lighter note, there were more cures for the common condition of warts than almost any other ailment. You could rub your hands in the forge water used by a blacksmith to cool his irons, or rub a freshly cut potato on the infected area and bury it in the garden; you could even rid yourself of warts by having someone "buy" them from you.

However, from personal experience my father still swears by this old charm for the cure of warts. About fifty years ago as a young boy in Armagh he was cured of twenty-eight warts on his hands using a charm involving a snail. He had to find a snail without looking for it and rub it over each wart three times. He then has to impale the snail on a thornbush, and when the snail fell off the warts would be gone. My father's warts had disappeared within a fortnight. Charm or coincidence?

A sty in the eye could be cured using the twig of a gooseberry bush with nine thorns. Each was in turn pointed to the sty and an Our Father, a Hail Mary and a Gloria said every time. The ritual was repeated daily for nine days to complete the cure. An altogether easier method simply required someone to say to the anointed person "There is a sty in your eye" to which they would reply "You lie" and they would be cured. Ringworm might be cured using the clay from where pallbearers walked or by a man or woman who never saw their father, blowing three times into the patient's mouth. In return he or she was required to be paid some small token or gift for the service.

In the past, as today, baldness in young men often caused much anxiety and any lengths would be gone to in an effort to rectify the condition. One of the old cures suggested the nightly use of an ointment made from the burned and ground embers of a sally tree mixed with hog's lard and turpentine. Even less savoury was a preparation to be rubbed on the scalp made from a jar of worms buried in a dung heap for a month. If the young man in question could not find romance, I venture to suggest that his baldness may not have been the only reason! It is also safe to assume that neither of these treatments worked or else they would be widely available on pharmacy shelves today.

Freckles, another common source of discontent in appearance, were thought able to be removed, or at least faded, by regularly bathing the face in the blood of a bull or a hare. The more squeamish could use the distilled water of walnuts, and both remedies offered about the same effectiveness as the cure for baldness. A sore throat could be cured by tying a stocking filled with hot potatoes around it, and an eel skin tied around a sprain would bring instant relief.

It was widely believed that the potent home-made poteen was a great cure-all, particularly for ague and rheumatism. It was said that if only the customs officers would leave these illicit stills alone "sure there wouldn't be a bit of sickness anywhere in Ireland".

One rather more distasteful remedy for toothache was to place a live frog in the mouth or chew on a frog's leg. Alternatively, the two back legs of a frog would be soaked in water for two minutes, a spoon of pepper added, and the mixture boiled for ten minutes before being applied to the painful tooth.

A County Mayo cure for shingles involved the rubbing of a zinc based ointment on the affected area of the patient accompanied by ten Hail Marys and ten Our Fathers. This was repeated for ten days at which time the painful blisters would have died away, but it would only work if the cure was performed by a man on a woman or vice versa.

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