Feeding bread to a donkey to treat whooping cough, rubbing a black snail on a wart and impaling it on a thorn are two of the hundreds of remarkable rural Irish remedies once believed to cure ailments.

Researchers from Brunel University of London have mined a rare archive of 3,655 folk cures, collected in the 1930s, to test a long-standing anthropological theory: People are more likely to turn to supernatural or religious remedies when the cause of illness is unclear.

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"The more uncertain or mysterious the illness, the more likely the cure involved magic or religion."

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The cures range from the religious—prayers over bleeding wounds, holy wells, and sacred stones—to the magically strange. One remedy instructed parents to put a sick child under a donkey three times and feed them bread first breathed on by the animal. Another claimed a seventh son could heal anything, provided a worm had been placed in his infant hand and held there until it died.

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