In bygone days, OTC medication was not “over the counter,” but “over the cookstove.” Goose grease, onions, sulphur (sulfur) and lard were ingredients for keeping kids healthy in southeastern Minnesota during the late 1800s and early 1900s. When doctors were few or often far away, mothers were ready with “folk medicine” – home remedies or “cures,” handed down through generations, to treat common illnesses. Poultices, plasters, compresses and syrups were concocted with available substances.
Several senior citizens, interviewed by newspaper reporter Ken Pritchard in 1980, detailed home health treatments during their youth in the Root River valley. Colds and sore throats were the most common maladies requiring kitchen cures. “When we got a cold or sore throat,” said John Fokema, 83, of La Crescent, “mother would take pure lard and sweeten it with sugar, and insist it would soothe our throat … It was miserable.”
Hazel Olson, 90, of Houston, said her mother mixed brandy, honey and hot water to treat a cold and then put the kids to bed beneath covers.
Esther McCall, 86, of Houston remembered her mother made cough medicine by “cutting up onions and boiling them, adding honey, lemon juice and butter until it was kind of thick. She put it on the back of the cook stove where it kept warm. We took a spoonful every one or two hours, and all of us used the same spoon.”
McCall elaborated about her mother’s compresses. “If our cold was bad, my mother would mix fried onions with lots of lard and put it in a white muslin bag. After the mixture cooled enough, she would put it on our night clothes over our chest. Each morning, she would remove the bag and reheat the mixture and repeat the pack for three or four days.
Sore throat? Lois Smale, 81, of Mound Prairie Township, said one could either gargle with salt water or suck on horehound candy. For a sore throat, McCall said, they would be greased with goose grease and then put to bed at night with one of their long black stockings tied around their neck.
John Sandau, 92, of Mound Prairie Township, agreed, “They used to use goose grease and grease ’em on the chest, then put them in bed and warm ‘em up.” Smale on goose grease: “Warm it up, and it was the greasiest grease there ever was.”
However, not all remedies called for warmth. Sandau added, for a bad cold, a dish of cold water would be placed near the bed where a towel would be dipped and then put on the chest before putting on a union suit (long underwear), “placing the whole bottom over the chest. By golly, you’ll get over a cold quickly.”
Removing infections, boils or sores called for a poultice, a mixture of ingredients, which was put in a cloth or bandage and placed over the sore or infected area. Olson said, “My mother would mix up onions and plantain (a broadleaf plant) to make a poultice and put it on the skin to draw bad things out.”
There was common poultice of bread and milk, applied to raise infection from stone bruises, which resulted from going barefoot. Olson remembered a mustard poultice that was used on feet as well. “And then there was the common soap poultice. We used Northwest Yellow Soap. It could draw the poison from a boil or sore.”
During the turn of the century (c1900), a skin rash called impetigo, known as “the itch,” went through the schools. “We wore sulphur bags around our necks when we went to school one winter,” recalled Smale. “We wore them to keep away the itch. And we didn’t get it. But that school must have stunk.”
Children, who did get it, were treated with sulphur and lard. Olson reported, “persons who had the itch would have to continuously change into clean clothes. Many children had to wear stockings on their arms to cover the sulphur and lard.”
For an earache, a little warm lard brought some relief or a smoker would blow smoke in a person’s aching ear.
McCall noted the use of cotton batten. For toothaches, she said a piece of batten with a drop of camphor would be packed into a cavity. Corns were removed with batten soaked with kerosene and then tied around the corn.
Children with stomachaches? McCall said, “We would mix hot water, sugar and peppermint and drink it hot.” And if you stepped on a nail, you tied a piece of salt pork around the wound.
For folks with sore feet, Fokema remembered hearing about relief after placing sliced raw potatoes in the shoes.
Children could also aid their elders. Olson’s mother drank red clover tea for her hay fever. Her own children, at the first blossoming of red clover, would go hunting for blossoms for their grandmother.
Fokema said his grandmother, for her cold, submerged her face in a bowl of chopped onions, claiming it cleared her sinuses. “Your eyes water … all that misery out of an onion.”
Not all remedies were reactive. Olson recalled preventative preparations. Children might have looked forward to spring weather but certainly not “spring tonics,” combining sulphur powder and molasses “to thin the blood after a long winter. The kids didn’t want it, but they took it.”
Fokema recalled a family that would “always take a nutmeg and cut a groove around it. Tying a thread to the nutmeg, they made their son wear the nutmeg to ward off disease.”
Olson said wearing a black silk string around your neck might prevent getting croup, a childhood respiratory illness, characterized by a barking cough. It was thought to be better than doing nothing. “What else could we do?”
Olson and McCall agreed that some of the remedies must have been effective, since they had lived as long as they had. Smale said, “We could only use what we had available. So much of it was improvising. We tried and used what seemed to work.”
Source: “if you think castor oil is bad, try some of these remedies,” Houston County News., December 11, 1980 by Ken Prichard.
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