Medicine: Spunk-Water & Psychoanalysis

Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn had definite ideas on the best way to cure warts. Tom favored "spunk-water" (rain water in a rotten tree stump). One of Huck's favorite prescriptions required a dead cat: "Why, you take your cat and go and get in the graveyard 'long about midnight when somebody wicked has been buried; and when it's midnight a devil will come, or maybe two or three . . . and when they're taking the feller away, you heave your cat after 'em and say, 'Devil follow corpse, cat follow devil, warts follow cat, I'm done with ye!' That'll fetch...