SPAT OR SPIT SKIN
SPAT OR SPIT FULL

Saliva contains immunoglobins, mucins, antibacterial peptides, antifungal compounds, factors that promote blood clotting, epidermal growth factor, histatins, lysozomes to zap bacteria, and leptin. So is this why my dog licks a cut paw obsessively? Or why holes and traumas in the mouth seem to heal faster than injuries to the skin? Earlier medicine seems superstitious now, but those doctors were on to something. Nicholas Robinson, an eighteenth-century English physician, mixed saliva with bile and pancreatic, gastric, and intestinal juices to dissolve “all manner of viscous humors and fabulous concretions.” Or just sogged up a piece of bread with fasting saliva to cure “the gout, the gravel, the stone, the asthma, and dropsy.”

SPAT OR SPIT FULL

In the Leech Book of the Fifteenth Century, readers were told they would need “a sausere full of fastynge spatyll” to cure “scabbis.” Albert the Great thought fasting spittle’s power was revealed by its ability to kill asps and other venomous creatures. Pliny wanted a woman’s fasting spittle to ease bloodshot eyes Irish peasants mixed it with clay from a holy well for sore or blinded eyes. The spittle of someone who is fasting has long been thought to have special curative powers. In Madagascar, the roar mafaitra-the first spittle of the morning, often foul-smelling-is believed to heal a sore ear or eye.

SPAT OR SPIT SKIN

Wet nurses used saliva to heal lesions on the skin of the newborn. Russians spat on their finger and drew a circle around a snakebite to exorcise its venom.

Hildegarde of Bingen wet a magnet with the someone’s saliva and drew it across his forehead while praying. The ancients thought it could erase lichen (were they mossy?) and leprous spots. In the fourth century, De Medicamentis noted that toothache could be cured by spitting into a frog’s mouth. When someone fell into an epileptic fit, ancient Romans spat upon them to ease the seizure. Jesus spat into a blind man’s eyes to restore his sight, Gonzalez-Crussi reminds us. But in The Body Fantastic, Frank Gonzalez-Crussi, professor emeritus of pathology at Northwestern University Medical School, links old hopes of healing with modern medical discoveries. Saliva keeps our mouths from going dry and lubricates a good meal’s passage down our throat.Īgain, you would think its role would stop there. Hardly the stuff of clay, we are more like waterworks, wet fluids pumping and streaming through our bodies at all times. Someone is “the spitting image” of a parent or grandparent-is that a reference to DNA’s presence in saliva? “I don’t give spit about that” demeans the fluid, yet it is essential to life. “Spit it out,” we say, demanding a confession. Our forebears saw saliva as powerful enough to ward off evil spirits. We turn saliva into a projectile when we are utterly disgusted with someone. You would think saliva’s significance would end there.Īh, but we equate salivation with desire, the force that runs our lives.

We wiggle away from when a grandmother spits on her hand to rub dirt off our face we welcome a French kiss. Nothing like the strong stuff, blood and urine and sweat and mucus. It seems so innocuous, clear and frothy and hopefully odor-free.

Spat or spit