Sometimes without a doctor to turn to, it was quite common for people to turn to folk remedies for relief of pain. Sometimes the remedies worked, sometimes they did not, but when you were in pain that was bad enough to make you want to tear your hair out, you were willing to try anything.
People seemed to have remedies for everything: a catch in the side, snow blindness, ingrown toe nails, hemorrhoids, coughing, hiccoughs, sore backs, water pups, warts, infected gums, earache, a rising ear, fever, frostbitten hands, toothache, boils, and a red streak up the arm. I don’t know the old time remedies for all of those ailments, but in my time as a teenager, I experienced a few remedies that were tried on me and I remember them quite well.
I recall having the toothache. It was quite common at the time. We never had much access to a dentist, so years of chewing on candy and gum and loads of sugar in mother’s cookies finally caught up with me. It was not common to brush after every meal, and even when I got a toothbrush, toothpaste was always at a premium. Mother always made sure that we always squeezed that last bit of paste out. Sometimes, we even ripped open the tube to make sure that we got it all. But years of poor habits finally made its mark and I knew it when I woke up from my sleep with pain that was shooting up through my face and heavy throbbing in my gums.
Tender nerves were exposed and every bit of food that I tried to chew, found its way there. The throbbing pain was enough to make me want to chew my face off. Mother tried it all to help relieve the pain. She gave me 222s and aspirin, but to no avail. I considered trying to yank it out myself if I could get my fingers around it, but lost the nerve. There were talks that I should go to Sandyville to get the gentleman there to charm my tooth. It was said that he was known for doing that for people, but I never did do it.
The last ditch effort for some relief, was father’s idea to put raw alcohol on a piece of tow, and drive it into my gums. That is what I did. I remember it well. The alcohol deadened my tongue, burned my gums, and frazzled all the nerves deep into my face, but I didn’t care at the time if it burned the whole side of my face off. I was willing to try anything.
The alcohol worked. I felt no pain. However, for a week afterwards, I chewed dead skin off the inside of my cheek. The alcohol had killed every living cell in the top layer of skin on the inside of my mouth.
Equal to a toothache, was an earache and rising face. It wasn’t anything strange for someone in our house to have an earache and be up all night with a hot towel or a hot water bottle on the side of their head. I guess we brought it on ourselves at times. We were often out in the cold and windy weather and sometimes without a day without a cap. That was our own fault, as mother used to say. We had plenty of wool caps hung up on the nail in our porch or in the heater above the stove, but sometimes pride got the best of us. But didn’t we pay for it.
The throbbing pain of an earache was relentless. There were many times that I put my head close to our hot wood stove, hoping that what was inside my head would break. Father, after seeing the agony that I was in, used to light up one of his roll your own Players cigarettes, and blow warm smoke into my ear. It was funny, but the warm smoke seemed to bring some temporary relief, but once it was gone, the aching and the throbbing returned with a vengeance. That was when I dug my head into a pillow that mother had warmed over her stove.
Feeling no relief by bedtime, mother decided to try her camphorated oil on me to see if that would help. She poured the oil into a saucer and then placed it on the stove to warm. Once it was warm enough, she took some tow from the aspirin bottle, soaked it in the camphorated oil, and pushed it into my ear. My ears cracked as the warm oil brought relief to the side of my head. A saucer of camphorated oil later, the swelling went down, and during the night, my ear broke. There was lots of evidence in the morning of the infection on mother’s new pillow case.
For a week after that, I kept my two ears stogged tight with white tow and kept them covered with the fur earflaps of my winter’s cap. I wasn’t a pretty sight, but the thought of a rising ear again, over took my pride.
Another thing that tested the power of home remedies, were warts. They were not as painful as having an earache or toothache, but they were very painful to look at. My two hands were literally covered with the gross things. I was embarrassed to turn my hand s over at Junior Red Cross meetings on Fridays.
I don’t know what caused the warts, but some people said that they came from jelly fish, while others said that handling kelp caused them. I could never have guessed what caused the ugly nonmalignant bumps that rooted on my hands. Come summer, I was into everything from catching eels, connors, sculpins, hand fish, young gulls, picking through garbage on the land wash, to turning over rocks from one end of the harbor to the other, looking for worms. Narrowing down the cause of the warts on my hands, would have been a challenging task for the best of doctors.
But whatever the cause, they were the devils to get rid of. I had warts on top of warts. Sometimes I tried to chew them off or scrape bits of them off with my pocket knife. Nothing seemed to work, whatever I did, the warts always came back.
Then one day, while father was working with council digging trenches and repairing roads, by chance came in conversation with an older gentleman who lived down the harbor. MacDonald was his last name. It had been said the he was known to put away warts. Whether he could or couldn’t, was an unknown. Father was of the mind that it was worth a try. With my two hands nearly rotten off with warts, my thinking was the same as fathers.
Father called me over to the old gentleman, who was leaning over his fence, his two hands clasped tight together. Father explained my situation to him. Without too much more conversation, the gray haired man reached out to me and grabbed my hands. He looked them over and passed his two seasoned hands over mine. Then he was done.
I never thought much of it then, but I can still remember it to this day. Before that winter was out, I never had one wart to call my own. I don’t know if the old gentlemen had anything to do with it or not, but every last wart was gone and my embarrassment was gone with it. Whatever powers he had, came through for me. I was living proof that something from somewhere worked for warts, but it was a remedy that few were known to have and it seemed to be kept a secret.
But for the most part, old time remedies were not a secret; unique probably, but not a secret. For in a place where medical advise, doctors, and nurses were scarce most of the time, people in pain, tried anything for relief and spread the word if they got any. Whether it was constipation, the gas, toothache, earache, warts, or any of the other ailments that were inflicted upon them, homemade remedies were often kept at arms length in some medicine cabinet or in the minds of those who had tried them, and over the years, saw them work.
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