Leeches

It happens that in some bodies of water there are leeches hidden from view. Due to the invisibility of these leeches, they are not guarded against and are swallowed. Sometimes they hang in the outside of the throat, sometimes they hang inside the esophagus, and sometimes they end up in the stomach. Often leeches are very small and those examining the throat do not notice them if they have just been sucked on. When enough time has passed and the leeches have sucked out a decent amount of blood, their body swells and they become visible.

Signs. The person to whom the leech has attached is attacked by melancholy and nausea and coughs up blood. If you see that a healthy person is spitting liquid blood and that he sometimes vomits blood, then examine the condition of his throat: there is often a leech there.

Treatment. Sometimes leeches visible to the eye are treated by grasping and removing them, as we will describe below, and sometimes medications are used in the form of gargling if the leech is close to the throat and steam. Medicines against leeches include those administered into the nose if the leeches have moved to the nose, as well as emetics and laxatives used against worms and the like, if the leeches are in the back of the throat and stomach. They also use other tricks against them. So, for example, a person sits in hot water or sits in a hot bath, especially after eating garlic, and then all the time, at short intervals, he takes cold water, cooled by snow, into his mouth. A leech, running away from the heat, leaves the place to which it has attached itself and goes to where it is colder. If the victim has to endure even such heat that there is a danger of fainting, then let him endure it, because this is a very good way to extract leeches. Often this is beneficial, even if you limit yourself to taking garlic and sit in the sun with your mouth wide open near a vessel with cold, snow-chilled water.

Some people force leech ingesters to ingest bedbugs and a genus of red, blood-colored, mite-like insects with thin skins that almost fall apart when touched, even gently. They are swallowed with vinegar or wine and the throat is smoked through a funnel with the steam from their infusion. These are probably the insects that are called al-anjal in our country. Vinegar alone, if sipped, often causes a leech to come out of the throat, especially vinegar with salt.

As for rinses, these include rinsing with vinegar and asafoetida in pure form or with salt, as well as rinsing with mustard with double the amount of bavrac or with mustard with an equal amount of ammonia, or rinsing with citvar wormwood with half the amount of sulfur, or with wormwood with an equal amount of nigella, or from wine vinegar in which garlic, lupine, coloquinth and male fern were boiled. Or they take two ukiyah of wine vinegar, to which they added three dirhams of bavrak and two cloves of garlic. Rinsing with the squeezed juice of willow leaves has a special property of expelling leeches, just like rinsing with vinegar with asafoetida or kalkatar with water. If the leech is in the stomach, then you should feed it with the following medicine: citvar wormwood, yarrow santolin, bitter wormwood, nigella, lupine, bush, embelin Kabul core, fern, two dirhams each, all with diluted vinegar.

The patient who has a leech inside is also fed garlic, onions or cabbage, or fresh mint and mustard with odorous substances and all sorts of pungent, caustic substances. After this, the patient is given an emetic if he vomits easily, and if it is not easy, then they give him something spicy and salty. If a leech hangs in the nose, then vinegar, nigella, squeezed juice of a mad cucumber   and harbak are injected into the nose. If it happens that it ruptures, then the victim should beware of screaming and talking, and if blood flows or vomiting or diarrhea begins, then treat as you learned in your place. Colchicum has a special property of eliminating this.

As for how to catch a leech with a hook, the person who has swallowed the leech should go out into the sun and open his mouth wide. They press his tongue down with a needle similar to a spatula, and when the leech becomes visible, they place a hook at the base of its neck so that it breaks. And the hook is the same one used to remove bumps from the nose.