The People's Songbag Exotic Medicine

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30745, 8 May 1965, Page 12

The People's Songbag Exotic Medicine

especially written for -The Press” b» DERRICK ROONEY*

The application of folk-lore is not confined to song and story; it touches every part of man’s behaviour—-his superstitions, his religions, how he dresses, how he talks, what he eats, even how he cures his ills. And it is in the field of folk medicine that some of the most extraordinary beliefs are found. There are plenty of manifestations of this in our own relatively sophisticated society—the cold key down the back of the neck to stop nosebleeds, the old sock around the throat to cure colds, the various remedies for warts, rheumatism, backaches and headaches. Some of them have a certain basis in scientific fact, but most are just superstition. In less developed communities, for example in certain rural areas of the United States, there may be found a vast assortment of folk remedies, some of them quite fantastic. Some Negroes mix potions from cow-dung and hog lard to treat pnuemonia, hang an uprooted bush above the sick-bed (death will stay away as long as the thorns are sharp) or refuse to sweep beneath the bed. White Illinois Egyptians have a host of curious remedies, including: Catarrh: kiss the nostrils of a mule. Fever: split a live black chicken and put it on the patients feet Gas: Raise your right arm three times; this will cure the gas. Measles: gather sheep droppings and make a tea of them. The measles will then come out. Rheumatism: Cross your stockings before

going to bed, then get up at midnight and cross them the other way. Scarlet fever: keep away from trees; the Indians told people that scarlet fever was everywhere in trees. Thrush: Have a person who has never seen his father blow into the child’s mouth. Whooping cough: let the patient crawl under a mule and the cough will go away. Although the society of twentieth-century urban man can offer nothing to compare with these exotic recipes, it is by no means free from superstition. Dr. Ben Fox, of southern Illinois, says that “it is hard for moderns to realise that folk medicine is practised all round them in both rural and urban districts, and that all social levels employ it in some degree. Dr. Fox is an authority on medical folk-lore and has written extensively on the subject. “Folk medicine,” he wrote in “Illinois Folk-lore,” “is made up of the empiricisms which are employed for the prevention of disease, without the background of investigation, by people without adequate training. It is closely related to superstition. Often it represents experience of the race in some far off and long forgotten time; sometimes it has value.”

From his experiences among rural communities, Dr. Fox gathered many odd remedies. One was a cure for snake bite which involved splitting a chicken the long way and binding half the fowl, raw side down, on the wound. In two or three days the carcase drew “so much pisen out of the bite that the chicken turned plumb green.” Dr. Fox commented: “It had not occurred to my informant that even in the absence of snake venom a chicken carcase decomposes in a few days and that the change in colour which was observed was produced by the ordinary process of rotting.”