In the 17th century in Kilmartin, Skye, “melancholy and low spirits” were treated by the blacksmith. The patient was held face up on the anvil while the smith wound up with his biggest hammer. He’d swing it down and deliberately miss as close as he could. Spirits lifted! It was said of the blacksmith “he ends in a Faint, else he Cure the Patient of all diseases…”
Skye crofter, Jonathan MacLeod (d.1874) was shot in the leg at Waterloo and lived with the bullet in his calf for ~60 years. When his son Angus was interred with him at Kilmartin, his grandchildren found the bullet in the earth, 72 years after it had been shot.
Dundee Evening Telegraph. 24th March 1887. pg. 2
1887 MACLEOD, ANGUS (Statutory registers Deaths 112/2 7)