“How on Earth did they survive…?”

How on Earth did they survive…?

By Kirstie Bingham

 

The history of medicine is both fascinating and somewhat alarming, to the extent that I wonder, “How on earth did they survive?” Medicine has thankfully progressed leaps and bounds, so we no longer have to depend upon the downright bizarre remedies of our ancestors. Let us now delve into the medical world to discover some of the cures that were once rumoured to be infallible.

 

Abscess – Find a rusty nail and scratch the abscess with the nail until the gum bleeds, then hammer the nail into an oak tree. Is anyone else screaming infection, please don’t do it! Plus it had to be an oak, so fingers crossed you could tell your oak from an ash tree.

 

Common Cold – For a cold, hang a stocking filled with hot potatoes around the patient’s neck, or rub a roast one on the patient’s head. As a lover of potatoes in all its culinary forms, this does seem like a waste of a good spud!

 

 

Cough – Find some spiders or young frogs, bathe them in butter and swallow them whole. I guess we all know where the phrase ‘frog in the throat’ comes from now.

 

 

Plague – Catch a chicken and hold the live chicken to the plague sores until the chicken dies. Let’s be perfectly honest, the chicken more than likely outlived you if you had the plague.

 

 

Warts – Touch each wart with a separate pebble, put the pebbles in a bag and drop the bag on the way to church, the finder will start sprouting your warts. Is anyone else feeling sorry for the poor unsuspecting soul who finds the bag?

 

 

Whooping Cough – Catch a fish, hold its head in the patient’s mouth and you can then return it to the river with the disease. On the other hand, pass the patient under and over a donkey, repeating the process nine times. I cannot help but imagine that the donkey would be thinking, “What are these stupid humans doing now?”

 

 

These remedies cannot help but make me smile, and I feel truly grateful that I live in the twenty-first century with access to medical care rather than the cure-all home remedies. These remedies all have a common belief that illness could be transferred to another living creature or an object, and once this had occurred, then the original patient would be healthy again. Now in these difficult times we are enduring with the current coronavirus pandemic, I hope we are all a tad more sensible than our forebears were, and don’t start looking at our pets as possible cures!