Foxfire 9
Page 7
LAURA PATTON
Mix mutton tallow and alum together. That’s good for colds. When you kill your sheep, cut the fat off and render it out. Put some alum in with it and mix it up. Then you put it in a jar and let it harden and make a grease cakelike patty out of it. Then when you get a cold or something you just rub it on your chest and neck. It will break a cold up.
NUMEROUS MARCUS
Put ginger and sugar in hot water. Drink this and go to bed.
GLADYS QUEEN
PLATE 28 Maude Houk.
For bad colds, make a tea of the leaves and stems of boneset, goldenrod, and wild rosemary. Boil these together until the water turns to a brownish tea color. If large bunches of the herbs are used in a small amount of water, the tea will turn very dark, like strong coffee. Strain and serve warm at bedtime. This should sweat the cold out of the patient. The goldenrod should be picked when it is in bloom, but do not use the blossoms.
In the fall before first frost, I would gather bunches of all three of these herbs. I’d tie each bunch up and hang it on the porch to dry. Then I had the herbs as I needed them.
MAUDE HOUK
We would make a tea out of the roots of butterfly weed. If it’s just a runny nose and coughing we would make it weak. We would make it strong if we came down with a heavy cold.
FLORA YOUNGBLOOD
Colic
Stew down some calamus root and mix a few drops with catnip tea. It’s good for colic in babies or in a grown person, either one.
NUMEROUS MARCUS
[Editor’s note: calamus is now a suspected carcinogen.]
Beat up a bulb of garlic. Make a poultice of bulb and juice and lay on the stomach.
SAMANTHA SPEED
Chest Congestion
Mutton tallow salve is good for relieving chest cold congestion. Spread it on chest and back between the shoulder blades and cover with flannel.
MRS. ED NORTON
Mix some lard and turpentine together, put it on a cloth, and put that on your chest.
AMY TRAMMELL
Make a tea from just the leaves of catnip. Pour boiling water over the leaves and sweeten it. To keep catnip through the winter, gather the leaves, dry them out, and keep them in a container where they can get a lot of air. They’ll keep a long time.
NUMEROUS MARCUS
Take mustard seeds and beat ’em up and mix a little flour with enough warm water to make a kind of paste. Smear it on a cloth and make a little poultice and place it right across the chest. It’d be warm and it would just turn the skin red.
FLORA YOUNGBLOOD
Constipation
Make a tea from senna leaves.
AMY TRAMMELL
Take about two teaspoonfuls of turpentine.
GLADYS QUEEN
Buy croton oil at the drugstore. Put one drop of the croton oil in a glass of water and drink that.
FLORA YOUNGBLOOD
Give kids two teaspoons of castor oil and give adults two teaspoons of Epsom salts.
SAMANTHA SPEED
Cooties/Lice
Shave head and wash with apple vinegar.
BILLY JOE STILES
Make a tea from the stems and leaves of the larkspur. Wash your hair twice in that tea and you won’t have any more lice.
FLORA YOUNGBLOOD
Corns
Tie five little flint rocks up in a rag. Throw them away at the forks of a road. When someone picks up the rag to see what’s in it, your corns will go away and they’ll get them.
ANNIE MAE HENRY
Take aspirin tablets worked in with a little bit of lard or Vaseline or anything to make a kind of salve. Bind the corn up with the salve and it’ll just come right out in a day or two.
FLORA YOUNGBLOOD
Cough
We would go up and down Sautee Creek and get the bark from red alder. We’d boil that and make tea. Add a lot of honey to it. That was our cough syrup.
FLORA YOUNGBLOOD
Drink ginger tea. Make it by mixing one tablespoon whiskey and one teaspoon honey and a dash of ginger mixed in one fourth cup hot water.
SAMANTHA SPEED
Mix honey and soda together. Take a teaspoonful before you go to bed and a teaspoonful when you get up.
FLORENCE CARPENTER
Boil five lemons in a small amount of water. Slice them while hot into a clean enamel pan. Add one pound sugar. Return to fire. Add one tablespoon of oil of sweet almond, stirring constantly. Take one teaspoonful at the first onset of coughing.
DIANE FORBES
Gather holly bush limbs and boil them to make tea. Drink one cup.
BEULAH FORESTER
Wrap an onion in wet paper and bury it in hot ashes. Let it roast about thirty minutes and then squeeze out the juice. Add an equal amount of honey to the juice, mix well and take by the teaspoon as you would any cough syrup.
Or take the fat from a skinned ’possum, cook the grease out of it and keep it in a jar. As needed, take the grease and rub it on your chest to loosen cough.
BOB MASHBURN
Heat together two tablespoons kerosene oil, one tablespoon turpentine, one tablespoon camphor (if available) and one cup of pure lard. Rub the salve on temples and the upper lip for head colds and on the Adam’s apple and chest for coughs and chest colds. Cover salve on the chest with a flannel cloth.
STELLA WALL
Use one part olive oil to one part whiskey and take two tablespoons every four hours until the cough is gone.
MRS. VERLAN WHITLEY
Mix one cup liquor to one half cup of honey and the juice of one lemon.
DOROTHY BECK
Add a pinch of soda to a spoonful of sorghum syrup (just enough to make it turn white) and stir and take.
ETHEL OWENS
Make tea by putting pine needles and boneset in boiling water. Sweeten with honey.
Or put some ground ginger from the store in a saucer and add a little sugar. Put a little of this mixture on the tongue just before bedtime. It burns the throat and will stop a cough most of the time.
ANONYMOUS
Croup
To prevent croup in children, make a bib from a piece of chamois skin. Melt together some pine pitch and tallow and rub it into bib. Have the child wear it all the time.
DIANE FORBES
Make a little ball up of a half teaspoon of sugar, a drop of kerosene oil, and about a half teaspoon of Vicks salve. Swallow this.
ANNIE MAE HENRY
Mix groundhog grease, turpentine, and a little lamp oil together. Dip a rag into the mixture and saturate it. Then lay that on your chest.
WILMA BEASLEY
Dip the hot ashes right up from a fireplace. Put enough ashes in a half glass of cold water to raise the level of water to the top of the glass. Let it settle until every bit of the ashes settles to the bottom. It’ll be just as clear on top and you take a spoon and spoon off some of the water. That cold water will cool the ashes down by the time it’s ready, so it will be cool enough to drink. I still use that for the grandchildren when I can find the ashes. It’ll knock the croup out just like that.
FLORA YOUNGBLOOD
Cuts and Sores
Pound a dock root until it’s soft and juice comes out of it. Put enough sweet cream on it to cover it. Rub the mixture on a cut or sore.
LOTTIE SHILLINGBURG
Bathe the sores off real good in warm salty water. Then you get Vaseline or something where the cloth wouldn’t stick and wrap it.
But if a sore got infected then they’d use the walnut poultice (ground walnut leaves and table salt).
FLORA YOUNGBLOOD
Diarrhea
Boil a lady-slipper plant in water. Strain the water and drink.
GLADYS QUEEN
Get some soot off the back of the chimney. Put a teaspoon of that soot in a glass of water. Let the soot settle out and drink the clear water.
FLORA YOUNGBLOOD
Pull up some blackberry roots and clean them and boil them. Strain and drink the water
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FLORENCE CARPENTER
Diphtheria
Make a little mop to mop the throat by getting three long chicken feathers and stripping most of the little feathers off the quills. Leave a few up on the end. Tie the quills together with thread with those three little bunches of feathers up on one end.
Then take some copperas and put it in a little metal lid (like a snuff can top) and set it on the hot stove. Let that copperas burn till it makes ashes. Pour honey into the copperas and work that up together. Dip that feather mop into that mixture and mop out the throat; three moppings and the diphtheria was gone. I had diphtheria and they used it on me. I have used it on my kids for real bad tonsillitis or any kind of tonsil trouble.
FLORA YOUNGBLOOD
Diphtheria, Prevention of
Put a lump of asafetida in a small muslin bag. Put a string on the bag and tie it around your neck so that the bag rests against chest.
ELIZABETH ENDLER
Dysentery
Boil plantain leaves (not the roots) and drink the tea often. This will cure dysentery.
Also, a tea made from dried strawberry or blackberry leaves will stop dysentery.
AMY TRAMMELL
Drink strong, sweetened tea; then eat five ounces of any good solid cheese with bread. Everyone knows that cheese is binding.
DIANE FORBES
Daddy used soot off the back of the chimney for dysentery (just as for diarrhea). Put it in a glass of water and stir it up good. Then let it set until the soot settles, and then just drink the water.
FLORA YOUNGBLOOD
Earache
Blow smoke from rabbit tobacco in the ear.
AMY TRAMMELL
Take the good meat out of a walnut. Put it into a rag and beat it up. Then dip this into warm water. Afterwards, squeeze the excess water and walnut oil into the ear.
WILMA BEASLEY
Boil pennyroyal. Pour the tea into a pitcher and put a cloth over the pitcher. Put your ear on the cloth.
VON WATTS
Put one block of camphor gum into a half pint to a pint of whiskey. Let it dissolve and add more camphor gum and let the mixture set idle. Rub it into the ear thoroughly. Use a lot. It will draw the poison out.
CLELAND OWENS
Use warm Vicks salve. Put it on a cotton ball and place that in the ear.
GENELIA SINGLETON
Put a drop or two of warm castor oil in the ear.
ANONYMOUS
Eye Trouble
Take a medicine dropper and drop warm salty water right in the corner of the eye. Hold your eye wide open and just let that salty water drain down through it. It burned a little bit. That’s good for something in your eye, or the sore eye or a scratched place on the eye.
FLORA YOUNGBLOOD
Fever
Teas made from boneset, or from the roots of butterfly weed, or from wild horsemint, or from feverweed are all good for colds, flu, and fevers.
AMY TRAMMELL
Boil half a cup of wall ink vine leaves to a quart of water. Give two teaspoons three times a day.
LAURA PATTON
A tea made of rabbit tobacco will break a fever.
AMANDA TURPIN
Pull up poor John (feverweed), making sure to get roots. Put roots, leaves and all in pan with water and boil. Strain. Add sugar to taste and drink.
DOROTHY BECK
Take several bulbs of garlic and wrap them in a cloth. Take a hammer and just beat them up. Tie the cloth around both wrists right where the pulse is. The fever will come down in maybe thirty-five or forty minutes. Back when the kids was all little I did things like that.
FLORA YOUNGBLOOD
Fingernail—Puncture
Dampen a wool rag with turpentine. Heat the rag and tie around the puncture.
ANONYMOUS
Fingernail—Smashed
If we got our fingernail smashed or cracked, or you know, torn in any way, we would take a little elm tree bark. We’d peel off the inside of the bark and bind it to the fingernail.
FLORA YOUNGBLOOD
Put wet chewing tobacco on it.
ANONYMOUS
Fretful Child
For a baby that’s squalling, take some ’sang root [ginseng] and put it in a saucer. Pour a little hot water on it and give the baby two teaspoons of that. In a few minutes it is all over.
HARV REID
Take a level teaspoonful of sugar and a drop of turpentine according to the age. If it is a little bitty baby, use about one drop of turpentine. Make that up in a little bit of water and give to him. It’ll just quieten down. I’ve done that many, many, many of a time.
FLORA YOUNGBLOOD
Frostbite
Just go to the spring and get that water—it takes spring water, not well water. Just warm it and soak the affected area in it and it’ll draw every bit of that frostbite out.
FLORA YOUNGBLOOD
Men would pour whiskey in their boots as a protection against frostbite. It was said to keep their feet warm for a long long time and didn’t even wet their boots or shoes.
AMY TRAMMELL
Headache
Find some lady-slipper with a yellow bloom on it. Dig the roots and make some tea and drink that about once a week and it’ll cure a sick headache.
MRS. E. H. BROWN
Soak strips of brown paper in warm vinegar. Bind them onto the forehead with a white cloth, or bind warm fried potatoes to the forehead with a rag.
ELIZABETH ENDLER
A headache is an inner fever in the stomach. You’ve got a fever in your stomach and it don’t show up anywhere else but up here in your head. You take something for the stomach, like a wee dose of Epsom salt. You take a teaspoonful to a half a glass of water. Stir it up real good and drink it down. That cures the headache.
FLORA YOUNGBLOOD
Heart
Dandelion tea is a heart stimulant.
AMY TRAMMELL
Hiccups
Putting vinegar on sugar in a spoon and taking that is said to stop them.
AMY TRAMMELL
Wet a leaf of tobacco and put it on your stomach.
VON WATTS
Take nine sups of water and you will quit hiccupping.
ANNIE MAE HENRY
If you could remember the last place you seen a frog that had been run over by a car on the road, it would cure the hiccups.
KENNY RUNION
Swallow three swallows of cold water without getting your breath, no more or no less. They’ll just go away. It still works. I’ve done it.
FLORA YOUNGBLOOD
Hives
Boil a bunch of catnip in water. Strain and drink.
GLADYS QUEEN
Hivey Babies
Get ground ivy and make a tea of the leaves and stems. Give some of this to a baby and it’ll just break them hives out. When they laugh in their sleep and wall their eyes, it’s because they’re not broke out. After they break out in a kind of a rash, they’ll rest from there on out.
FLORA YOUNGBLOOD
Inflammation
Boil a beet leaf and put it on the inflamed spot and tie a cloth around it.
FLORENCE CARPENTER
Itch
Make ointment out of one teaspoon of sulfur and four teaspoons of lard.
ELIZABETH ENDLER
Kidney Trouble
Make a tea from boiling mullein roots.
AMY TRAMMELL
Gather a large amount of peach tree leaves, boil in water to make tea, and drink.
BEULAH FORESTER
Get the dead silks off an ear of corn. Boil in water, strain and drink.
GLADYS QUEEN
Make tea either from the whole spearmint plant, or put three or four leaves into a cup and pour boiling water over them and cover until cool. Then drink.
LAURA PATTON
Measles
Drink diluted sheep manure to ensure that the measles will “pop out.” Sheep manure has a high temperature quotient.
DIANE FORBES
ANONYMOUS
Mumps
To keep mumps from going down into breasts and privates, tie a silk ribbon around a girl’s neck (snug, but not too tight), or a silk tie around a boy’s neck.
LOTTIE SHILLINGBURG
Nerves
Use the root of a yellow lady-slipper. Boil the root a long time, until the water turns a brownish tea color. Strain and drink.
MAUDE HOUK
Make a tea of elder flowers by steeping them in boiling water only a few minutes, then strain off. Tea may be sweetened or taken plain.
DIANE FORBES
Nosebleed
Take a small piece of a brown paper sack and fold it into a square and put it under lip and press.
LESTER J. WALL
Pull the hair on top of your head straight up until bleeding stops.
BEULAH FORESTER
Let your nose bleed on a knife blade and stick the knife in the ground. Your nose will stop bleeding.
Or take a pair of scissors and run them down the back of your neck.