Finding a Use for Folk Cures

In late August, my husband and I vacationed in Nova Scotia, that part of Canada so far east that it falls in the Atlantic time zone. The remote northeastern area in which we stayed is still accurately reflected by a description in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1847 poem “Evangeline”: “This is the forest primeval.”

It is a landscape dense with evergreen trees and hundreds of lakes, rivers, inlets, coves and other encroachments of the Atlantic Ocean, with tiny villages and almost deserted roads. I had an opportunity to talk with one of the senior residents of Charlos (pronounced “Charles”) Cove, a hamlet with no apparent industry and no stores or gas stations. Agatha Feltmate spoke about the early days of life in her village, and inevitably, the conversation turned to health. Then, problems were treated with recourse only to the environment and tradition. Such remedies, often the forerunners of today’s complementary therapies, are found in every culture.

Feltmate said her mother believed in preparing an annual tonic to clean the blood after a winter of salted foods. Bark was peeled from dogwood and cherry trees, small branches from juniper bushes added, and the collection stewed. After straining, 3 to 4 gallons of “spring tonic” was ready for use. It tasted good, she said, like beer. Indeed, some people added yeast and made beer from it.

Also to counteract a winter of salted foods, Feltmate’s father added his own cleansing regimen. He mixed sulfur and molasses. “Every morning he’d be there when we came down after sleep. We’d each get a spoonful for 10 days. For 10 days after that, he’d give us a spoonful of Epson salts. Kept the body and the blood flushed out.” These recipes came from her Irish grandfather. Another early spring preventive, assumed from Ireland as well, involved swabbing the children’s throats with a rooster feather dipped in warmed kerosene oil. An Indian remedy was used to clear infants’ mouths of germs; it was made by dipping a gauze pad in blackberry root that had been boiled and then cooled.

Feltmate described treatment of a bad wound she suffered in her youth. It was 1919, and her father was a lighthouse keeper in an area where medical help was unavailable. “I had a fashion of getting mussels every morning. One day I slipped and cut my leg on a sharp rock. Blood was spurting out. Mum washed it with creolin (still used today as a disinfectant). She went into the attic and brought down a bunch of cobwebs. Put them on my leg and bandaged it up. I should have had stitches, but there was nothing else you could do. No boat or anything to get to a doctor. You’d have bled to death. But this took care of it.” The cobweb remedy, she thought, came from her French mother.

Burdock leaf dipped in vinegar with salt and pepper added was bound to the head to treat headaches. A strong-smelling green ground plant, tancy, was wrapped around limbs to reduce swellings. Ginger tea, made from purchased powder or root, treated stomach aches in remote Nova Scotia as well as in Asia and other parts of the world. Garlic was believed to be good for colds, and some people hung garlic around the neck to ward off not evil spirits, as was the Eastern European custom, but flu or colds. We laughed about the possibility that wearers smelled so bad that others avoided close contact, thereby stemming the spread of germs.

Another important remedy came from the sea. “I’ve seen my father take the liver from the cod. If you drink the oil, you may not get a cold. It also lubricates the limbs against arthritis and keeps constipation away.”

Some of the folk and family remedies described by Feltmate have gone by the wayside, discarded as modern medicine developed more effective, easier-to-use products. Aspirin and Tylenol, for example, eliminated the need for wrapping burdock leaves about the head to relieve headaches. Others, such as Epsom salts or kerosene taken by mouth, and tancy, are dangerous. But some treatments from Feltmate’s early years remain in use today. We know them as complementary therapies: garlic, ginger, cod liver oil, blackberry tea and even juniper tonic.

Some folk remedies, like my grandmother’s raspberry tea for sore throats, will be passed on to future generations. Or possibly antioxidants in raspberries will be isolated and developed into pharmaceutical versions of their useful but more dilute predecessors.

Folk or family remedies that remain community staples are today’s complementary, supplemental therapies. In turn, some of these therapies may hold the seeds of tomorrow’s powerful medications. The forest primeval remains a plentiful and scientifically studied source of help for human ills.

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Send questions by e-mail to BarrieC@juno.com. Her column appears the first Monday of the month.