Ailments and Remedies

In the “good old day,” kids caught infections—measles (three-day, German, and red), mumps, chicken pox, scarletina, bee stings, flea bites, sunburn, pink eye, ear infections, tonsillitis, strep throat, boils, canker sores, ringworm and pinworms; and suffered a few traumatic injuries on top of that—Jon had a broken collar bone, Tina had a broken arm, Mark needed stitches in the palms of his hands, Sam broke a leg, Patty pinched the tip of her forefinger off in a car door, and there were more. The big, serious risk of polio was present.

     The theory was that kids needed to catch the measles, mumps and chicken pox when they were young, when the infection wouldn’t phase them a bit.

     For most ailments, a kid didn’t see a doctor. There was no health insurance, and for some stretches, there were no doctors in Florence, OR. That’s why, when I got tonsillitis and infections in both ears, Milly and Vake parked Sandy with the neighbors and drove 50 miles to Coos Bay, where the doctor met us at the hospital.  Mom and Dad reassured me before we arrived that I would be seeing nuns, and their black gowns and white wimples were just their costumes, and nothing to be afraid of.  Dr. French lanced both eardrums and gave me a shot of sulfa, to which I had an allergic reaction.  He shifted to penicillin, which had been mass-produced in the U.S. for only about 5 years at the time, since 1945. It hadn’t been perfected yet, so that it was quickly excreted. For me, that meant a shot in the butt per day for the rest of the week until the infection was defeated.  By the time I was high-school aged, we had a regular family physician, Dr. Richard Ulmann, who knew my medical history so well that he always offered me a dose of penicillin instead of money for babysitting the Ulmann children.

     For many of the ailments, there were over the counter patent medicines and home remedies. For pink eye (conjunctivitis), there was Argyrol, a compound of silver nitrate and sodium hydroxide, dark brown drops that were dripped into the infected eye. (It had been invented as a treatment for gonorrhea and made a mega-millionaire of its inventor.) For cuts and scrapes, it was Merthiolate, which contained mercury, but it wasn’t supposed to sting, like iodine does. (It’s a brand name for thiomersal, a preservative in vaccines and now shown NOT to cause autism in infants. However, it’s highly toxic.) Merthiolate was bright red-orange, much prettier than brown iodine. It could make your scrape look significant.  If your cut was really important, you could patch it with a Band-aid—flesh colored, of course.  For a toothache, you could suck on a wooden toothpick that had been saturated with clove oil, until you could get to the dentist. For an earache, you could try pouring warm oil (mineral oil, baby oil or olive oil) into your ear; it might help until you could get a shot of penicillin. You can still buy it on the internet.  Sore throat? Gargle warm salt water. Ringworm? When the boy across the street got it in his hair, his folks shaved his head, placed a penny soaked in vinegar on each lesion, and covered his head in a stocking cap made of an old silk stocking. I saw enough silk stocking caps and shaved heads around to think it was a fairly common remedy.

     Is the problem a bad cold? Break its hold on you with a hot toddy:  Place one tablespoon of lemon juice, one tablespoon of honey, and one jigger of tasty liquor such as brandy, rum or bourbon in a teacup.  Fill the cup with hot water, chug it, and go to bed. I subscribe to that one. If it doesn’t work, having a hang-over isn’t going to be any worse than having the cold.  

     Cousin Jon offers a couple of current remedies, with citations.  But like I told him, having a real doctor in the family, I check with Mark before I self-dose. Jon says:

 From the objective, to the (somewhat more) subjective:

To relieve the sting of most bites (& kill chiggers), apply CHEAP roll-on deodorant, e.g. Ban, for as long, and as much as needed.

Simple headache: one generic Excedrin & 1/2 capsule Feverfew powder, with a glass of water.

Simple arthritis (such as of the finger joints): 50 mg (or more) of Pantothenic Acid (Vit B-5) per day. (It's destroyed in cooking.)

Bladder infection (I've not had to use this): 3 to 5 grams of D-mannose sugar (from the health foods store) every three to four hours while awake until symptoms are gone. (Footnote 1).

Memory loss (or losing), to include possible dementia, Alzheimer's, (& ALS - amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehrig's disease), 1&1/2 mg lithium (or more) (from the health foods store) per day. (Footnote 2).

Footnotes:

(1) BREAKTHROUGH, Suzanne Somers, 2008, pp 22-24.

(2) Ibid, pp 30-33. 

     Reading these, I am reminded of our remedy for mosquito bites when I was digging dinosaur bones on the Wyoming prairies. It was Avon’s “Skin So Soft.” The leader of our dig was Dr. Robert Bakker, the famous paleontologist.  Being a scientist, he tested the stuff, and found that it made the mosquito dissolve!