Natural Health and Home Remedies

Home Remedies

My Aunt Kathy is up from Missouri, and this weekend her, my mother, and I were speaking of the many spells, concoctions, remedies (tortures) that their mother (my grandmother) subjected my cousins, siblings, and me to in our youths. Anything from a coughs, the flu, spider bites, wasp stings, or a case of head lice was readily cured by something that my grandmother believed would help.

                Many of these home-made cures were staples of the medicine cabinet and they doubled as medicinal and practical purposes. I hated to mention to Grandma that I felt anything less than the utmost of health and vitality. At the mere whisper that my stomach was upset, Grandma would serve me up a sweet but hideous looking glass of prune juice. It looked like the swill at the bottom of a tobacco chewers spit cup, and I must say that as a child, I thought it tasted that way too. The prune juice was meant as a stool softener—constipation was her go to diagnosis. If the prune juice didn’t quench grandma’s taste for inflicting torture, Castor oil did; the oil, a taste I will never, ever, forget was like the oldest, ugliest, and flat out meanest brother of stool softeners . . . it worked beautifully.

Another surefire way to cure an ailment was with Vick’s Vapor Rub. Even if you tried to hide it, grandma could tell by your voice that you had a cold. The white container with a blue lid in her hand, she sat on the edge of the bed and had you sit up. I admit that it was nice and soothing when she would rub some on my chest and under my nose; it made my eyes water a little, and I actually could breathe a little better. However, was it really necessary, Grandma, to make me eat a finger full of this greasy salve? It coated my teeth as I choked it down, making it impossible to sleep for I then had to incessantly swallow for fifteen minutes straight trying to vacate my mouth of that impossible coating.

Sometimes I felt as if Grandma and my mother sat at the window waiting/praying for one of us to fall and scrape a knee. Why else would they consider putting what felt like battery acid on our cuts and scrapes? Walking in the house with a banged up knee, she would grab a bottle of Mercurochrome or iodine and swab it into the open wound. Oh my God, how it burned. Back then I was sure that it would burn completely through my leg, “It burns Grandma!” any one of us would say as she fanned the burning with a magazine. “It’s ok. We used this stuff when I was a little girl and it healed right up,” she would say. I still cannot believe that they endured the same pain in the early 1900s and in turn passed it on to their kids and grandchildren. I know, because they always told me, that people were tougher back then, but give me a break. It seems borderline insane.

Just like all kids, my cousins, siblings, and I loved Easter, Halloween, Christmas, and Valentine’s and all the sweet sugary goodies that our parents allowed us to stuff in our mouths. In the same way that kids think about the present, and not the future when they stand in place and spin in circles, we gorged and gobbled all the sweets we got our hands on. Mom, because of Grandma’s warning, worried about the worms that Grandma assured her would infest our stomachs from eating too much candy. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down?—baloney! Grandma used a spoonful of sugar to transparently mask the disgusting taste of turpentine (the kind that cleans paintbrushes). It worked as well as a smile masks a shark.

Bug bites: I was gathering eggs for my Great Uncle Virgil when I was a teenager. Somewhere in the process I was bitten by a spider. A knot the size of a silver-dollar raised on my arm. Upon showing my uncle (who smoked a pipe), he put a big chaw of the pipe tobacco in his mouth and after it was real good and real slobbery, he splatted it onto my arm and wrapped a kerchief around it. I remember watching his spit seep out from underneath the cloth and drip off my arm—yuck—but my arm healed. So again, I guess it worked.

Anyhow, I survived the stomach aches; the stopped up noses eventually cleared up; my knee did heal; I am never and probably never will be malnourished or wormy, and my arm never fell off from the spider bite. So that being said, maybe it worked? What kind of home remedy tortures do you remember?