Baby boomer’s special home health remedies

By Terry Shaw of Willmar 

We are nearing the end of the “cold and flu season” and I was thinking about how my mother handled health things in our home. Growing up in the 1950s, my mother did everything she could to avoid the cost of taking me or my three brothers to the doctor at the clinic. I don’t think we could afford it. She used a lot of the same home remedies that her parents had used on her. 

Castor Oil was a common household treatment 50+ years ago

Upset stomach? She would give us some saltine crackers to eat, or a glass of warm 7-Up or ginger ale. That was the only time we ever had a bottle of pop in our house. “Mom, I don’t feel good.  Can I have some pop?” I gotta say, we cheated a couple of times to get that expensive pop. 

“You’ve got a cough,” our mother would say. “Take your shirt off and lay down on your bed.” Then out came the small green-capped blue container of Vicks VapoRub. She would scoop some in her hand and rub it on my chest, to my objections. “Oh, Mom! Grease! Don’t!” 

Headache? The best we could do was to take a low dose aspirin and gag to get it down. That was the cure-all for most ailments. “Take two aspirins and call me in the morning.”

If this sounds familiar, you’re probably a “Baby Boomer,” like me. You got a cold, sniffly nose, or a fever? Hot chicken noodle soup, usually Campbell’s. Funny, most kids didn’t come down with these ailments in the summer. Only when they could get out of school, I think. 

I woke up one summer morning, when I was 12, and discovered that I couldn’t bend my left arm. There was a hard lump of something inside on my elbow bone. My mother took me to the clinic and one of the doctors there decided he had to cut my arm open and pull out the hard puss-like growth with a tweezers. He did it rather painlessly, and I was quite pleased with myself for my bravery. I have a tiny half-inch scar there now. 

When I was in the ninth grade, I woke up to discover that the lump was back. This time, however, it was on my left knee. I panicked because I didn’t want to miss school. I had a perfect attendance record going of never missing a day of school. I thought I could just do what the doctor had done. My single mother had gone off to work and so I got some scissors, some tweezers, a bottle of peroxide, some mercurochrome, some iodine, a couple of Band-Aids from the medicine cabinet and I operated on myself.

Some of the common “remedies” in my family to avoid a trip to the clinic. Contributed photo

My knee was already numb, so I poked at the lump with the scissors until I had opened the skin.  I took my mother’s tweezers and pulled out the offending lump, doused the wound with peroxide, swabbed on some mercurochrome, (Ouch! The first time that my self-operation had hurt!), bandaged the whole mess up and limped off to school. It never came back nor did it get infected, but I still have a dime-size circular scar on my leg today from that operation.

I mentioned peroxide and mercurochrome. Mothers kept a supply of each in the medicine cabinet plus a bottle of iodine to treat our knee scrapes and cuts. If you were really sick and had to go to the doctor but couldn’t, the doctors still made house calls. I remember a couple of doctors coming to our house with their little black bags. 

Usually, the only time we went to the clinic was to get some shot (vaccination) in the butt for something. 

I remember one time when I had an earache, my mother called up an uncle who lived in town. He came over, lit up a cigarette, and proceeded to blow warm smoke in my ear. It worked.

Some remedies that were used, but my mother didn’t use because we didn’t have the ingredients in the house or we kids refused them, were honey and lemon tea, chewing on raw garlic, or gargling salt water for a sore throat. Have a canker sore? Dab some alum on it with a Q-Tip. Ginger tea was used for nausea, or a mustard plaster for chest congestion. Having trouble going to the bathroom? Carter’s Little Liver Pills, Milk of Magnesia, cod liver oil, castor oil or your mother would break down and go to the drug store and buy some Ex-Lax. (They looked like Hershey’s chocolate pieces and that came in handy for us kids on April Fool’s Day. That’s another story.)

Some of the products used to treat ailments in my home growing up. Did you have these too? Contributed photo

Of course, there were candy-tasting cough drops like Luden’s Wild Cherry flavored or, my favorite, Smith Brothers Black. Once we found out about them, we cheated in school all the time. “Are you eating candy?” the teacher would ask. (A school no-no.) “No, ma’am. These are cough drops that my mother gave me to take to school. I’ve got a cold.” 

And how about the rubber hot water bottle that was laid on your stomach, chest, or feet? 

Some parents kept a bottle of blackberry brandy in the freezer (to thicken it up) and give a spoonful of it to their kids for diarrhea or a bad cold. Toothache? Shove a piece of clove down in the space next to the tooth. And we always seemed to have apples around the house a lot. Maybe because they were readily available or maybe because our mother believed that “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.”