Home remedies and folk medicine on the frontier

Home Remedies

Given the expense, paucity, and lack of success of doctors, when people on the frontier got sick or hurt themselves, they turned first to home remedies before going to a physician.

Home remedies have a long tradition in American medicine and were by necessity the first response to sickness in isolated frontier homes. They were immediate, cheap, and effective.

The isolation of frontier settlements made women the first line of defense for most medical problems. Frontier women relied on common sense, herbs, and their experience to handle most illness. Every family had recipes for medications, so-called Granny medicine.

Some frontier women became known for their nursing or special talent in remedies. Others became midwives, helping other women through childbirth. Home remedies consisted of ingredients that could be found around the house in an emergency. Generally cheap and common household staples were used—whiskey, vinegar, soda, sugar, soot, and wood ashes.

Household preparations often included ingredients such as Sulphur, asafetida, alum, blue mass, camphor, and Epsom salts.

Also popular were kerosene or turpentine (either applied topically or taken internally), mustard, coal oil, and paregoric (for diarrhea). Another source of home cures and remedies included products from domestic animals—lard, milk, and manure. Common garden vegetables, especially onion and garlic, were widely used as topical cures and poultices. A few of these concoctions actually worked. A study published in CHEST a few years ago demonstrated that chicken soup actually decreased the symptoms and duration of colds.

Another home remedy, drinking a toddy made from sugar, lemon, and whiskey to help coughs, also works. After a few doses, the patient does not care if he coughs. Witch hazel does shrink hemorrhoids, and wet tea leaves (which contain tannic acid) are effective when applied to burns. Common home remedies include: An infusion or tea: a beverage like a tea made by boiling a plant in water. One example is sassafras tea (root beer). A decoction: an infusion with more prolonged boiling, then cooling and straining, before drinking.

Willow bark, taken for arthritis, is one such decoction. A tincture: a powdered herb dissolved in alcohol. A poultice or plaster: a remedy applied to a skin area. A plant is crushed into a pulpy mass, mixed with corn meal or bread and milk, and applied directly to the skin, or placed between two pieces of moist cloth to prevent irritation to skin.

The most popular poultices contained cayenne pepper or mustard seed, and most warmed the skin and increased blood flow to afflicted areas. A common recipe consisted of ½ to one teaspoon of cayenne pepper made into a plaster or liniment and applied to the afflicted area. Other popular poultices included mug wort and chamomile.

Certainly, home remedies almost always made most of the patients feel better. The power of suggestion, the so-called placebo effect, helped people cope with their ills and pains. Even today, studies of the placebo effect document that up to 50 percent of patients state they feel better when given sugar pills.

Folk Medicine

In our American culture, patients often rebel against the medical establishment and embrace alternative medicine, including what is called folk medicine. Folk medicine usually contained a bit of magic and was usually given under the guidance of a local healer. A family’s folk medicine often represented the vestiges of beliefs brought by immigrants from their native land. On the frontier there was little alternative but to use folk medicine. Traditional medical care was not readily available and was not very effective, particularly for chronic diseases such as rheumatism or pain.19 Folk medicine traditionally used devices such as: Transference: transferring the illness to another object, such as placing a broom or hoe under the bed to treat back pain. Amulets or charms: garlic or asafetida around the neck for colds, and copper bracelets for rheumatism. Rituals and incantations: especially the rubbing of affected areas or the recital of Bible verses. Colors: red medicine for blood disorders or yellow for jaundice.

Typical Recipes for Folk Medicine Cures Here are some typical recipes for folk medicine cures. Baldness: Smear your head with fresh cow manure or rub head with daily with axle grease or cod liver oil. Bleeding: Apply cobwebs to the wound (this actually works by promoting clot formation). Colds: Eat sugar saturated with kerosene or turpentine. Soak feet in hot water, then eat a bowl of hot milk with raw onions sliced in it. Go to bed and sweat it out. Take dried frog skins and make a powder of them. Mix with fruit juice and drink the potion.

Chills: Drink red pepper tea or put dry pepper in your socks. Besides home remedies and folk medicines, patent medicines were available either through the mail, purchased in the local mercantile store, or bought at a passing medicine show. Proprietary medicine manufacturers found ready customers through the country stores, and many a poor frontier farmer carried home potions, pills, and ointments to cure bilious disorders, kidney stones, their wives’ “female problems,” and scabies or lice.

Most of these concoctions were harmless, but some contained addicting substances such as cocaine, opium, and heroin. Almost all contained large amounts of alcohol, usually 40 percent or more. But for the frontier sufferer the relief obtained, however brief, from their chronic pain by the patent medicines made them desir able and worth the cost.

A SPECIAL NOTE TO ALL OF OUR READERS

If you are having trouble with your Genealogy or just want to know who your Great Grandfather was and what he did The Cass County Genealogical Society might be able to answer your questions

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