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Trivia: Odd Remedies

 

Here's a list of home remedies that were once popular in Europe, courtesy of Richard Gordon's The Alarming History of Medicine:

Warts

• To prevent warts, never let your children touch the water used to boil eggs.
• Find a man who never saw his father and touch his coat.
• Rub your body with a potato.
• Touch each wart with a separate pebble, then put all of the pebbles in a bag and drop it on the way to church. Whoever finds the bag will start sprouting your warts. (Hmm, I wonder what God would think of this remedy!)

Rheumatism

• Sleep with your dog, who will absorb your rheumatism.

Pediatric Hernias

• Find a young pollard-ash, split it longitudinally, and hold it open with wedges. Get the child to strip, and push him or her through the gap in the tree. Plaster the tree with loam and swathe tightly. If the tree heals, then so will the child. If the cleft in the tree continues to gape, then so will the hernia.

Mumps

• Take the halter from an ass and put it around the patient. Lead the patient around the pigsty three times.

Sexual Health

• Eating raw potatoes, carrots, cabbage, and mint were believed to enhance sexual stamina.
• Eating potatoes with garden peas were believed to act as a contraceptive.

Colds

• Hang a stocking filled with hot potatoes around your neck, or rub a roast potato on your head.

Whooping Cough

• Drink water from the skull of a bishop.
• Drink a draught made from sheep droppings boiled in milk.
• Catch a live fish and hold it in the patient's mouth. The fish will take the disease with it when you return it to the river.
• Pass the patient under and over a donkey nine times.
Also see our article Old Wives' Tales and our trivia on old medical terms.
 

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Article published on May 22 07 12:59AM.

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