How Many Licks

When it started, I thought my ten-year-old dog, Danny, had a sore hip. He was trying desperately not to limp on our walks and even inside the house. He was old but he was still active, and he’d been running more miles with me in the fall of 2018. I thought he’d pushed himself too hard and injured his hip, probably because I push myself too hard and injure my hip.

It turned out that, while my dog and I were close, we were not exactly the same. He, for example, fully embraced the barefoot running craze, while I have always worn running shoes. After a couple of days of my treating the hip injury it turned out he did not have, I discovered that Danny had scraped his rear driver’s side paw raw. The largest pad at the base of his foot was red and weeping, as well as a couple of toe pads (or to use the scientific term, “toe beans”). I spent two days apologizing to the dog for not seeing the problem for what it was, despite the fact that he very effectively hid the injury from me. He was very good at enduring injuries and not limping lest he be left behind for morning runs. What I’m saying is, this was really on him.

I did feel terrible for him though, so I called the vet. The kind vet tech who answered the phone told me exactly what I expected to hear: there’s nothing to do for a scraped paw because dogs are on their paws all the time. Nothing to stitch, but I could bandage it if I wanted. The best thing to do, she said, was to rinse it with hydrogen peroxide twice a day and let him lick it.

I’d heard this from the vet before when Danny had injured himself. As long as a wound is shallow and not serious, dogs are pretty good at keeping things clean. I’d also read this same advice a few days before in a text from the thirteenth century.

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Gerald of Wales

“A dog’s tongue has healing powers,” Gerald of Wales wrote in The Journey through Wales from 1214. “If a dog is hurt, it can heal itself by licking the places.…If a dog has a bad place on its neck, or its head, or some other part of its body which it cannot reach with its tongue, it transfers the healing properties of its tongue to the wound with one of its hind feet and so heals itself.”

Okay, Gerald was a priest, not necessarily a medical man. I cannot confirm the transference of healing powers from canine tongue to feet. But Gerald was certainly not the first to propose that dogs’ mouths had healing properties. According to a medical history published at the turn of the twentieth century, there was a Mesopotamian medicine known as dog’s tongue. There was also a goddess of health and healing, Gula, who was often shown with a dog.

Ancient Egyptians were among the early believers in the healing powers of dog tongues, and then the Greeks picked this belief up from the Egyptians. The Greek temples of Asclepius had dogs that were trained to lick people’s wounds, and they were believed to have a “presentiment of epidemics,” according to Patricia Dale-Green in “The Healing Lick and the Rabid Bite.” Dale-Green wrote that in Punjab, dog’s tongues were supposed to contain ambrosia. And there were Assyrian deities called aralêz, which she translates as “licking continually,” that were born from a dog and healed soldiers’ wounds.

If all of these ancient civilizations believed in the healing power of dog tongues, I figured it must appear in the Christian Bible as well. I was not disappointed. Here’s Luke 16:20-21:

And there was a certain beggar name Lazarus [not that Lazarus], which was laid at the gate, full of sores, and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table; moreover, the dogs came and licked his sores.

But alas, the beggar dies in the end. For that matter, so did the rich man with the crumbs.

French Kisses

A couple of centuries after Gerald of Wales recommended dog licks for healing, Saint Roch, who was born in the early fourteenth century, left his birthplace of Montpelier to live a religious life in Rome. He treated plague suffers along the way and finally, once he’d reached Rome, got sick himself. Even though he’d helped so many, he was banished from the city. While he was wasting away in the forest, a dog found him and licked his plague sores, and they healed. The dog also somehow brought Roch bread without eating it himself, which is what Danny would have done. More believably, the dog’s master followed his thieving dog and found him ministering to Roch’s sores. Roch eventually was named the patron saint of dogs, but I feel like that dog deserves recognition for being willing to lick plague sores. Or dogs are just gross as a rule.

Saint Roch being the patron saint of dogs and French makes perfect sense, as that country has a reputation for its love of dogs. They’re everywhere, eating off plates and pooping on the linoleum in shopping centers. If you’re feeding your dog at the table, you probably assume your dog’s mouth is pretty clean, if not downright medicinal. There are a few idiomatic ways of saying this in French: langue de chien, langue de medecin (“the tongue of a dog is the tongue of a doctor”) is one; la langue d’un chien vaut la main d’un medecin (the tongue of  dog is better than the hand of a doctor”) is another. Either way, dog’s tongues are healers in France.

Modern Medicine Weighs In

We’ve learned that “old wives’ tales” and traditional medicinal practices have some validity, but not every single bit of folk wisdom holds up. For example, the early Roman natural philosopher Pliny apparently thought that dog vomit cured dropsy. I’m not entirely sure how that cure was to be administered. Topically? Internally? Either is a no, thank you.

Folk Beliefs of Southern Illinois, published in 1950, has a list of things people in the region believed. It has “103. Let a dog lick a wound to heal it,” but also “119. To cure shingles, rub on the blood of a black cat.” The author did note that people would share all the beliefs they knew of but that they did not always believe these things themselves. So do not smear cat blood on your shingles, please. Maybe try the vaccination instead.

But modern science has indeed found that dog licking is good for dogs and for humans. Dog’s tongues will clean out the dirt in a shallow cut or scrape. So will a human tongue, if you’d like to lick your own wounds, be they physical or metaphorical. Saliva has been found to contain histatins, which ward off infection, and epithelial cells, which grow and close the wound. Both of these speed healing.

Keep in mind that dogs and humans both also have a cocktail of bad bacteria in their mouths that can cause infections. This can be especially dangerous to either species if the wound is deep and those bacteria are introduced into the muscle.

Let Wounded Dogs Lick

So as much as I could, I let Danny lick his own paw and keep it clean. When it was causing him so much pain he couldn’t walk on it, I used antibacterial ointment that had a little pain-killing action along with a nonstick gauze pad, some stretchy wrap, and a waterproof bootie over it.

The scraped paw did take a long time to heal, as the vet said. But I could also see the new skin growing over the raw, red scrape. I was watching those epithelial cells doing their job. Gerald of Wales and my vet gave basically the same advice across eight hundred years, and my dog was able to return to morning runs.

Sources

“Dogs in the Ancient World” in the Ancient History Encyclopedia: https://www.ancient.eu/article/184/dogs-in-the-ancient-world/

Stanley Coren’s “Can Dogs Help Humans Heal?” column in Psychology Today from June 7, 2011: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/canine-corner/201106/can-dogs-help-humans-heal

Patricia Dale-Green’s “The Healing Lick and the Rabid Bite: A Study in the Symbolism of the Dog,” published in the January 1964 issue of British Homeopathic Journal: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0007078564800788

“The History of Medicine,” a note on the publication of the book, was published in The British Medical Journal on August 24, 1912: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25298328

Lelah Allison’s “Folk Beliefs Collected in Southeastern Illinois,” from The Journal of American Folklore, 1950: www.jstor.org/stable/536530

Danny on top of the world. Or at least this small hill. (2009-2021)