The Arizona sentinel., 1888-03-10
JAPANESE MOxA CURE.
How Patients are Treated with Burnin
 Cones of Sticky Dough.

How Patients are Treated with burhih s
 Cones of Sticky Dough.
 While we lunched in the open quad- rangle before the temple groups of cheerv Japanese came in, chattering as gavly as any picnickner could wish to, took off their straw sandals, washed their feet, and disappeared in jolly parties to the interior of the temple. When we dropped our shoes and fol- lowed to the one upper room, we found our jolly chattererS all there, sitting in rows with their faces to the walls. All were stripped to the waist, and the old . priest made marks on their backs in sacred characters to indicate where the moxa should be burned. Following him came small boy with lump of what appeared to be very sticky dough in one hand. With dexterous fingers this youngster pinched off a piece of dough, rolled it into a small cone, and stuck it over the priests mark. After him came staid, stoical youngster, who in the most cold-blooded way touched Q match to the tip of tine hpXt cole and went down the , lines giving lights. It burned without flame, a slow red glow like charcoal, consuming the cone down to the flesh, where it sizzled and smoked for a few seconds. that must have seemed years to the victims. Soaring with a red-hot iron would be quick and humane treat ment compared to this slow-eating fire of the moXa. The men and women that l watched for the few minutes that [ could endure it, stood it heroically, but by the tension of every muscle in their backs and arms one could judge of their agony. One old man folded his arms. bent his head over and indulred in suppressed chuckles that varied with groans and hysterical ha! haLha's! A woman buried her face in blue cotton towel and made no sign or movement, while two moxa cones were burning down and into her flesh. A young man started to rock to and fro when the fire began entering into his very bones, but soon stopped it, braced himself, and sat motionless. The priest, having set his seal on his victims, sat down by brazier. put on his big spectacles, and was lost in reading pious book, wholly indifferent to the row of backs frizzlino beside him. This mine priest has some secret of composition for his moxa dough that has kept it in favor for many years, and about the only reve- nue of the temple is from his patients Bees. For rheumatism, Iumbago, and such aches and ills it is most beneficial. and gives quick relief to any one heroic enough to endure it. The Japanese resort to moxa for almost everything that ails them, and one sees coolies with their backs and the calves of their legs covered with moxa scars. Foreign doctors have discovered the virtues of the treatment for certain things, and in Paris many cases of paralysis have been successfully treated, Charles Sumner having been one of the famous cases, whose paralyzed nerves were revived by the mOXa. A variation of the treat ment used in Paris under the name of moxa consists in burning with white hot irons, which is much less painful than with paste cones, and Clara Mor- ris was one of the best advertised sub jects undergoing the white-iron moxa. When the patients descended from the moxa room, put-on their sandals, and muttered sullen prayer toward the open door of the temple. they were hardly to be identified with the gay people who had arrived earlier; and when they walked, it was plain by the way they held their shoulders, that the raw places still smarted.-jSt. Louis GlObe-DenocrGt.