An article in a recent edition of this publication was one of those that rocked my off-center sense of humor.
It had to do with “folk remedies” used by early residents of the Ozarks, mainly women who (I guess) served as pseudo physicians in a region where there were few, if any, real ones.
Many of these remedies were passed down through the generations, with lots of them probably originating among poor populations in various parts of Europe. As the article stated, many of them didn’t work.
No wonder.
My take on the subject is that is that people were probably doing what they could to have their gravely sick or severely injured relatives or friends find comfort in a belief that something was being done to help them. It’s kind of like a friend of mine likes to say, “let’s try something, even if it’s wrong.”
Still, I find some of these old-timey techniques to be fantastically gross, and in many cases, I have a hard time fathoming just how such an idea might have been thought up. Allow me to share a half dozen of them, and ponder them in appropriate fashion.
• No. 1: To cure yellow jaundice, eat nine chicken lice on bread and butter.
So, would using 10 lice lead to an overdose? Can I use margarine if there’s no butter in the fridge?
And what if me and my neighbors have no chickens? Would lice from a seventh-grader’s head work?
I think I’ll just stay away from yellow jaundice.
• No. 2: To help your heart, scrape off the black stuff off the skillet and use it in a tea.
“A” tea? Does that mean the black stuff is the tea, or are you supposed to put it in a cup of you favorite blend, like Lipton green tea or organic dandelion tea?
And can I put sugar in it, or maybe even half-and-half ?
I guess if I want to be proactive about heart health, I should ask my wife to burn some bobcat thighs on the stove. I’ve heard it makes great black stuff.
• No. 3: To care for colds, rub on a mixture of skunk grease and mutton tallow.
Wait, skunk grease? Uh, I don’t know what that is, and I don’t want to. And mutton tallow; are we talking sheep fat? There were fat sheep in the Ozarks way back when?
My mom always made a concoction of lemon and honey, and turned on the old vaporizer in my room at night. I guess she didn’t have access to that other stuff (thank God).
I think I’ll stick with drinking lots of water, and maybe down a bit of Nyquil just before bed so I can sleep OK.
• No. 4: For warts, rub them with a dish rag and bury the rag, or go to the crossroads and throw nine rocks in different directions, or charm them away.
Wow, options! How cool is that? If I ever have a wart issue, I’m going to try the third option.
I’ll be like, “even though your presence is not entirely unwelcome, I’d like to request that you to please vacate my body. While I realize that may inconvenience you, I’m certain you’ll understand. By the way, you are truly a bunch of handsome warts.”
• No. 5: For sinus problems, find mold on the door of an underground cellar, breathe nine times deeply into the mold and make a cross in the middle of your hand each time. Do this three times for every other day for nine days.
The article said that people were getting penicillin from the mold (although they may not have known that). I’d say that might not be all they got from it.
But then, if you got a chest infection or skin rash from the mold, all you had to do was drink a cup of pond water laced with mosquito larva twice a day for four days, making sure you added some ground up night crawlers and a crayfish head on the fourth day.
• No. 6: For a goiter on neck, take the hand of a dead person and touch it to the goiter.
Directions: Find dead person. Detach hand (left or right will work). Use hand to slap goiter from right to left twice, then left to right once. Return hand to place of origin. Note: Goiter will not be affected, but brain of person with goiter will.
There are surely many, many more examples of medicinal remedies from the olden days of the Ozarks, and most are no doubt as wild (or wilder) as these. As a proud resident of the region, I’m just glad things have progressed to the point where I don’t have to take any of these suggestions seriously.
But then again, who am I to say that guzzling some lizard saliva tea or downing a sun-dried patty made of bobcat poo and ground snail shells now and then wouldn’t be good for what ails me?
As one of the original Ozarks medicine women might have said, “y’ain’t tried it, so how d’ya know it don’t work?”
Doug Davison is a writer, photographer and newsroom assistant for the Houston Herald. His columns are posted online at www.houstonherald.com. Email: ddavison@houstonherald.com.