THE POTENT POTATO

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 124, 28 May 1929, Page 6

THE POTENT POTATO

A correspondent told a Southern paper the other day about the virtues of New Zealand flax roots, boiled, and the potato, raw, as cures for various ills. Rheumatism, he alleged, could be cured by eating raw potatoes, and so could that tropic fever trouble beriberi and the scurvy that sometimes afflicts long-voyage sailors and Polar explorers, though not to the same extent as in former days. As for flax root boiled to a syrup, it settles skin troubles. The Maori has long known the usefulness of flax root juice for various ills. In the old wars gunshot wounds and spear jabs and now and again a bayonet thrust were tended by the bush doctors. who used chiefly the water of boiled flax root. A Taranaki Maori told me that after he stopped a British bullet in the Sentry Hill fight in 1564 he was taken to his home and there made a quick recovery under the "wai-harakeke" treatment. As for raw potato, Dana in his "Two Years Before the Mast" described how a sailor, seemingly dying from scurvy towards the end of a long voyage, was cured when some fresh vegetables were obtained from a coastwise vessel. The juice of raw potatoes had such an effect on him tha,t in two days he was up aloft again furling sail. But the most curious use of raw potato was one confided to me at Rotorua a good many years ago. A dear old parson, staying in the same place of accommodation, hoard two of us discussing rheumatism and the hot mineral bath cure. Fie came up to us and produced a bit of much -withered potato from his right-hand waistcoat pocket, and said: "Prevention is better than cure. Carry a piece of raw potato in your pocket and you'll never get rheumatism. I'm never without it and I'm always well." The old boy's faith in the bit of spud was so touching that we hadn't the heart to rally him on his superstition. I quite forgot to ask him whether it was absolutely necessary to carry the anti-rheumatic totem in his right-hand waistcoat pocket, and whether it would lose its efficacy if it was transferred to the left. For all I know, he may have pronounced some special incantation over it which charged it with magic powers, no matter where it was carried. But the point of importance was that he was ache-proof while he had it in his pocket. Cause and effect are hard to connect in his case, but the power of imagination is wondrous strong, perhaps stronger than all the balneologists and other 'olooists in creation — TANGIWAI.