I recently read an article that really charged up my offbeat 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 techniques had been 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.
I don’t find that surprising.
My viewpoint on the subject 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. While that might be true and I understand the logic, I still find some of these old-timey approaches to be astonishingly gross, and in many cases, I have a hard time fathoming just how such an idea might have been conjured up.
Allow me to share several of them and ponder each one in appropriate fashion.
•To cure yellow jaundice, eat nine chicken lice on bread and butter.
So, would using 10 lice lead to an overdose? Can margarine be substituted 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 do my best to stay away from yellow jaundice.
•To help your heart, scrape 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 your 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.
•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).
•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 that third option.
I’ll be like, “even though your presence is not entirely unwelcome, I’d like to request that you please vacate my body. While I realize that may inconvenience you, I’m hopeful you’ll understand. By the way, you are truly a bunch of lovely warts.”
•For eczema or acne, rub a black hen’s blood on the affected area.
I guess you’re out of luck if there’s no black hen available.
Of course, you could try using your Rhode Island Red hen or Jersey Giant black rooster, but the odds are stacked against any success (which might be the case anyway).
•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.
•For a goiter on the 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 probably will.
There are surely many more examples of “medicinal” remedies from the early days of life in 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 we don’t have to take any of these suggestions seriously.
But then again, who am I to say that guzzling some possum saliva tea or downing a sun-dried patty made of buzzard droppings 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?”