ANGELS AND MINISTERS OP GRACE 257
It
is related that this saint in his travels, once meeting a poor woman
whose only child had swallowed a fish-bone, relieved the child of its
trouble by offering up a prayer and laying his hand upon its throat. In
the prayer he adjures all who may suffer from a like trouble to seek
his intercession with God.
St.
Apollonia of Alexandria (February 9) is said to cure toothache and all
diseases of the teeth, the reason for this being that at her martyrdom
all her beautiful teeth were pulled out. In a similar way St. Agatha,
of Catania or Palermo, in Sicily, is endowed with the power to cure
diseases of the breast, because it is related that before her
martyrdom her breasts were cruelly torn and mutilated.
To
recite the formula of St. Apollonia was considered by the Spaniards of
three centuries ago to be a cure for toothache. This fact is brought
out by a passage in Don Quixote, when the knight's housekeeper is urged
to recite it for her master's benefit when he is ailing. To this
request the woman quickly answers: "That might do something if my
master's distemper lay in his teeth, but, alas! it lies in his brain."
This formula was probably used before the age of Cervantes, and has
persisted to our own time. It is in verse and has been literally
translated into English as follows:16
Apollonia
was at the gate of Heaven and the Virgin Mary passed that way. " Say,
Apollonia, what are you about? " " My Lady, I neither sleep nor watch,
I am dying with a pain in my teeth." " By the star of Venus and the
setting sun, by the Most Holy Sacrament, which I bore in my womb, may
no pain in your tooth, neither front nor back, afflict you from this
time henceforward."
Of Santa Lucia (December 13), born in Syracuse on the island of Sicily, a strange legend is told. A young man fell
" Parmele, " Tothe-Lore," reprint from the International Dental Journal, January, 1899, p. 14. IT
