As I write, I sit in my room with the lights off; a cluster headache is making me miserable, but dealing with the glare of my netbook screen while I type is somehow much easier than lying in the dark with the pillow over my face.
While we are on the subject of headaches, I am pondering some of the time-honored cures I was dealt growing up. My grandparents on both sides were very much people of the earth; my father’s family was one of the last families that left Cades Cove in 1955 when the park service took over (Dad was eleven), and my mother’s family was still growing tobacco as I grew up to earn a living. They were the typified poor-but-honest workers, and I couldn’t be prouder to have come from such folk. They lived a much more simple life, but to avoid romanticism, not a much easier one. This meant knowing how to handle yourself without outside help. This includes medicine, and through generations of commonsensical know-how, experience, and doing what it took to survive.
Some of the more colorful medications I endured as a child make my friends laugh, because very few believe me. When my friends would get Robitussin, colorfully attractive childrens’ medications, and other “mainstream” remedies, my maternal grandmother would have a thousand folk cures that somehow worked just as well and oftentimes better.
One of her favorites was tobacco on an insect bite. Grinding a fresh tobacco leaf to rub on it was better, but a bit of spit and snuff would do just as well.
Another I remember was a mustard-paste compress she once put on my chest when I had a terrible cough. I know that there was flour involved, mustard, possibly pepper, and what I still think was vinegar. This was all stuffed into a hastily-sewn handkerchief, and pushed against my chest. I hated it, because for three days I stank of mustard and vinegar; I can’t complain beyond the smell, though, because it worked wonders.
For stuffy heads there was a special tea- ginger, mustard, black and red peppers, anything that was spicy- all brewed into a devil’s drink that one shotgunned not only for the temperature but because it was undoubtedly one of the most evil concoctions ever conceived. But it worked.
Headaches were cured by chewing on mint (which grew plentiful outside the back door), or by holding the webbing between your thumb and forefinger WITH the forefinger and thumb of the opposite hand.
Vinegar once again reared its head when I had a sunburn, and I ended up smelling like a bean salad when she was finished. For fever blisters, one used Camphor (I still find tiny green bottles labelled “Camphor Phenique” in places), or vanilla. Ice worked too, if you caught it early enough.
I could write on and on for days about the things I saw used or was the “victim” of as a child. They worked, mostly, with no ill effects. The only one that to this day terrifies me is castor oil to relieve constipation; the medicine worked a little too well, if you want to know. I encountered a similar method of knowledge when I first visited Germany last year; a painful blemish on my neck was healed with a teabag heated very warm, and my cough was banished with a combination of liquorice-flavored liquor and something very, very bitter. My boyfriend hurt his wrist, and was subjected to having it wrapped tightly by his mother- but not before she pulled out a battered plastic tub filled with dry, pale-brown clay. She broke a few pieces off, wet them in the sink, and liberally applied the mud to his wrist before wrapping it and sending him on his way. My grandmother died this past October at 85; my boyfriend’s mother is 62, the same age as my mom. People with this kind of knowledge are growing rarer and rarer as time progresses, and it saddens me to think that such valuable knowledge is being lost in the face of conformism to technology and what the men in white coats say.
What are some home-cures you know of that actually work? Most of my knowledge (limited though it is) is of Appalachian remedies; I don’t know much about what other regions, countries or cultures have come up with.
…extra points if anyone knows how to get rid of a very, very stubborn headache!
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