Life was certainly different for the diseased and injured before health care plans. When I was a child, medical care was pretty much handled on a do-it-yourself basis. Unless a limb was dangling uselessly, or blood was spurting out at right angles to your body, a doctor wasn’t usually needed.
The first time I saw a doctor was when I was five years old and he came to our farmhouse to deliver my middle brother, Dwain. A very interesting process, I might add, since in the hubbub, no one thought to take me out of the bedroom.
For almost anything other than the aforementioned dangling, spurting, and birthing, there was a home remedy.
For coughs, colds, stuffy noses, and sore throats, Vicks and Mentholatum were the accepted standard of care. There was no more comforting feeling in the world than having Vicks rubbed on your chest, topped off with a warm flannel cloth tucked around the chest and neck.
Another comforting treatment was given for earaches. Mom would heat one of her flatirons on the cookstove, wrap it in flannel and put it in my bed, up against my sore ear. Heavenly. I always stretched that earache out for as many nights as possible.
There was even a remedy for general orneriness. If we kids seemed to be in a bad mood over several days’ time, we were lined up and dosed with spoonfuls of Castoria, a yummy treatment for constipation, which apparently had the side effect of dispelling crankiness. We never knew where Mom hid the Castoria. I’m sure she knew we would have gotten into it and emptied the bottle.
For plain old constipation, there was nasty, disgusting castor oil, which did the trick, in spades, and made me really cranky. I can still recall those castor oil burps and when I married, I never inflicted castor oil on my daughters, nor did I ever own a bottle of that repulsive stuff.
Stubbed toes and skinned knees were a constant each summer in my early years, when I ran barefoot and barelegged all day long. Nothing had a chance to heal until school started. It was agony forcing swollen throbbing toes into stiff new school shoes, and suffering those starched stiff dress hems brushing my raw kneecaps.
Most scrapes and scratches, if treated at all, were painted with iodine, merthiolate, or mercurochrome, and it was a childhood badge to run around with constant patches of red dyed skin from one of these treatments. The iodine burned like fire, but I guess it was safer, since the other two medicines contained mercury.
Bug bites were a given, and you either scratched a lot or your mother swabbed you with calamine lotion, and you still scratched a lot.
Big spoonfuls of bright yellow sulfur eaten at the beginning of the season were supposed to repel chiggers and other pesky pests. I don’t know how effective it was, but I liked the taste of the sulfur, anyway.
Some of us were prone to warts, but I was lucky enough to have a great-grandma living on the next farm who could wish away warts. I still remember a nasty growth of long standing on my thumb, which Grandma rubbed with her own thumb, saying, “That’ll go away now,” and in a few days it did.
Everyone got “infantigo” (impetigo), a nasty scabby disease that always seemed to start on my upper lip and head up into my nose. If it wasn’t under control by the time it got into one’s nose, that did warrant a trip to the doctor, because everyone knew “infantigo” would go up your nose straight into your brain and you would die.
My oldest brother, Reid, somehow contracted a bad case of ringworm on his scalp, and my desperate mother had no idea how to treat it. She happened to check the Clorox label and found that the application of diluted bleach was a cure for ringworm. It worked like a charm.
We all had the normal childhood diseases—chicken pox, scarlet fever, mumps, both kinds of measles. With the “hard” measles, you had to stay in a dark room or you might go blind. The mumps hit us after we moved to California near the end of World War II. In those times you were quarantined for some diseases, and when we contracted mumps, we four kids and Mom were confined to our 24-foot-trailer, ostracized by the quarantine sign in the window. I’ve forgotten how long we were isolated, but I can only imagine what Mom went through cooped up with the four of us, while Dad was allowed to escape guiltily to work each day. She was never quite the same afterward.
We had all been vaccinated for smallpox, of course, and my brothers and I still have the scars on our upper left arms, a vestige of times past.
Worms were another childhood hazard. I don’t remember ever getting them, but they were common and I imagine we probably had them. In fact, I’m absolutely sure we had them, since everything we weren’t supposed to eat gave us worms, according to Mom. Sugar of any kind straight out of the container would do it—brown, powdered, or granulated. Raw cookie dough, pie dough, cake batter, and biscuit dough were definite carriers, along with raw potatoes and raw hamburger. Too much candy—Christmas, Easter, or Valentine’s—you were a goner. If we liked it, it was deadly. Brother Reid liked to eat the heads off those large sulfur kitchen matches. Worm attractor? No doubt about it.
Mom’s remedies seem old-fashioned now, but at least I didn’t have to wear an “asofittidy” (asafetida) bag around my neck in the winter to ward off colds, coughs, the flu, and probably evil spirits, as my poor mother was forced to do. Mom hated that smelly thing, but most other kids were wearing them, too, so she wasn’t alone in her pungent misery. The secret about those bags was that you smelled so bad, no one else would go near you, so you didn’t get exposed to anything.
Another helpful remedy from Mom’s youth was the method for warding off tetanus. If you stepped on a rusty nail, all you had to do was find the nail again and grease it, and you wouldn’t get lockjaw!
As I said, we didn’t go to doctors often. My middle brother was delivered by a doctor, and I was taken to one because I was a bedwetter of Olympic proportions. He didn’t cure that nasty little affliction and I managed to outgrow it on my own--eventually.
We three older kids went to the doctor to have our tonsils and adenoids removed in one massive office visit, as all three operations were performed at his office. We went home immediately and were pampered by my harried mother for several days, whining and complaining, eating enormous amounts of ice cream, and milking our invalidism for all it was worth.
The only other doctor visit I can recall involving our family was when brother Dwain had a sore thumb that simply would not get better. Mom finally had Dad take him to the doctor, and when they returned, Dad said the doctor could find nothing wrong. Mom, with a mother’s innate suspicion, asked my brother which thumb he had shown the doctor. Dwain held up his good thumb. When you think about it, why would he have let the doctor touch the thumb that hurt? Back they went to the doctor, who diagnosed a sprained thumb!
I used at least one of Mom’s remedies even after I was on my own.[1] When my older daughter was a baby, she had a vicious diaper rash that was impervious to anything I put on it. Mom finally suggested I try scorching white flour in my cast iron skillet, and rubbing that on my daughter’s bottom. She looked like a big old biscuit, but it worked!
_____________________________________________
[1] I should mention here that when I was about 12, I discovered that my parents were only borderline functional. I tried everything I could to get them to “smarten up,” but they resisted my sincere efforts. I was astonished, after I married and had a child, to find that my parents had finally done something about their ignorance and had somehow acquired both knowledge and wisdom. I found I could now turn to them for answers about things like childrearing, budgeting, housekeeping, marriage, and even simple home repairs. In fact, I found that I sometimes turned to them every day.
The first time I saw a doctor was when I was five years old and he came to our farmhouse to deliver my middle brother, Dwain. A very interesting process, I might add, since in the hubbub, no one thought to take me out of the bedroom.
For almost anything other than the aforementioned dangling, spurting, and birthing, there was a home remedy.
For coughs, colds, stuffy noses, and sore throats, Vicks and Mentholatum were the accepted standard of care. There was no more comforting feeling in the world than having Vicks rubbed on your chest, topped off with a warm flannel cloth tucked around the chest and neck.
Another comforting treatment was given for earaches. Mom would heat one of her flatirons on the cookstove, wrap it in flannel and put it in my bed, up against my sore ear. Heavenly. I always stretched that earache out for as many nights as possible.
There was even a remedy for general orneriness. If we kids seemed to be in a bad mood over several days’ time, we were lined up and dosed with spoonfuls of Castoria, a yummy treatment for constipation, which apparently had the side effect of dispelling crankiness. We never knew where Mom hid the Castoria. I’m sure she knew we would have gotten into it and emptied the bottle.
For plain old constipation, there was nasty, disgusting castor oil, which did the trick, in spades, and made me really cranky. I can still recall those castor oil burps and when I married, I never inflicted castor oil on my daughters, nor did I ever own a bottle of that repulsive stuff.
Stubbed toes and skinned knees were a constant each summer in my early years, when I ran barefoot and barelegged all day long. Nothing had a chance to heal until school started. It was agony forcing swollen throbbing toes into stiff new school shoes, and suffering those starched stiff dress hems brushing my raw kneecaps.
Most scrapes and scratches, if treated at all, were painted with iodine, merthiolate, or mercurochrome, and it was a childhood badge to run around with constant patches of red dyed skin from one of these treatments. The iodine burned like fire, but I guess it was safer, since the other two medicines contained mercury.
Bug bites were a given, and you either scratched a lot or your mother swabbed you with calamine lotion, and you still scratched a lot.
Big spoonfuls of bright yellow sulfur eaten at the beginning of the season were supposed to repel chiggers and other pesky pests. I don’t know how effective it was, but I liked the taste of the sulfur, anyway.
Some of us were prone to warts, but I was lucky enough to have a great-grandma living on the next farm who could wish away warts. I still remember a nasty growth of long standing on my thumb, which Grandma rubbed with her own thumb, saying, “That’ll go away now,” and in a few days it did.
Everyone got “infantigo” (impetigo), a nasty scabby disease that always seemed to start on my upper lip and head up into my nose. If it wasn’t under control by the time it got into one’s nose, that did warrant a trip to the doctor, because everyone knew “infantigo” would go up your nose straight into your brain and you would die.
My oldest brother, Reid, somehow contracted a bad case of ringworm on his scalp, and my desperate mother had no idea how to treat it. She happened to check the Clorox label and found that the application of diluted bleach was a cure for ringworm. It worked like a charm.
We all had the normal childhood diseases—chicken pox, scarlet fever, mumps, both kinds of measles. With the “hard” measles, you had to stay in a dark room or you might go blind. The mumps hit us after we moved to California near the end of World War II. In those times you were quarantined for some diseases, and when we contracted mumps, we four kids and Mom were confined to our 24-foot-trailer, ostracized by the quarantine sign in the window. I’ve forgotten how long we were isolated, but I can only imagine what Mom went through cooped up with the four of us, while Dad was allowed to escape guiltily to work each day. She was never quite the same afterward.
We had all been vaccinated for smallpox, of course, and my brothers and I still have the scars on our upper left arms, a vestige of times past.
Worms were another childhood hazard. I don’t remember ever getting them, but they were common and I imagine we probably had them. In fact, I’m absolutely sure we had them, since everything we weren’t supposed to eat gave us worms, according to Mom. Sugar of any kind straight out of the container would do it—brown, powdered, or granulated. Raw cookie dough, pie dough, cake batter, and biscuit dough were definite carriers, along with raw potatoes and raw hamburger. Too much candy—Christmas, Easter, or Valentine’s—you were a goner. If we liked it, it was deadly. Brother Reid liked to eat the heads off those large sulfur kitchen matches. Worm attractor? No doubt about it.
Mom’s remedies seem old-fashioned now, but at least I didn’t have to wear an “asofittidy” (asafetida) bag around my neck in the winter to ward off colds, coughs, the flu, and probably evil spirits, as my poor mother was forced to do. Mom hated that smelly thing, but most other kids were wearing them, too, so she wasn’t alone in her pungent misery. The secret about those bags was that you smelled so bad, no one else would go near you, so you didn’t get exposed to anything.
Another helpful remedy from Mom’s youth was the method for warding off tetanus. If you stepped on a rusty nail, all you had to do was find the nail again and grease it, and you wouldn’t get lockjaw!
As I said, we didn’t go to doctors often. My middle brother was delivered by a doctor, and I was taken to one because I was a bedwetter of Olympic proportions. He didn’t cure that nasty little affliction and I managed to outgrow it on my own--eventually.
We three older kids went to the doctor to have our tonsils and adenoids removed in one massive office visit, as all three operations were performed at his office. We went home immediately and were pampered by my harried mother for several days, whining and complaining, eating enormous amounts of ice cream, and milking our invalidism for all it was worth.
The only other doctor visit I can recall involving our family was when brother Dwain had a sore thumb that simply would not get better. Mom finally had Dad take him to the doctor, and when they returned, Dad said the doctor could find nothing wrong. Mom, with a mother’s innate suspicion, asked my brother which thumb he had shown the doctor. Dwain held up his good thumb. When you think about it, why would he have let the doctor touch the thumb that hurt? Back they went to the doctor, who diagnosed a sprained thumb!
I used at least one of Mom’s remedies even after I was on my own.[1] When my older daughter was a baby, she had a vicious diaper rash that was impervious to anything I put on it. Mom finally suggested I try scorching white flour in my cast iron skillet, and rubbing that on my daughter’s bottom. She looked like a big old biscuit, but it worked!
_____________________________________________
[1] I should mention here that when I was about 12, I discovered that my parents were only borderline functional. I tried everything I could to get them to “smarten up,” but they resisted my sincere efforts. I was astonished, after I married and had a child, to find that my parents had finally done something about their ignorance and had somehow acquired both knowledge and wisdom. I found I could now turn to them for answers about things like childrearing, budgeting, housekeeping, marriage, and even simple home repairs. In fact, I found that I sometimes turned to them every day.
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