Dave Wood

Every morning when I whirl my drug carousel to grab my daily batch of pellets that keep me alive (just barely), I thank the good Lord for populating the world with medical scientists who came up with potions more pleasant than the home remedies earlier generations were forced to ingest or slather on to keep them healthy.

At a recent family reunion, we sat around a table and traded anecdotes about the home remedies visited upon us by our grandmas and grandpas and moms and dads and even tales about people we never knew who had remedies that made us laugh and made us cry and made us shout out loud “ARE YOU KIDDING!!!??’

Our southern belle sister-in-law recalled her days on her family’s Alabama farm, where a good slug of kerosene couldn’t hurt and probably helped.

My father remembered when his mother cooked a batch of onions and brown sugar into a slurry and made him gargle it when he had a sore throat, which turned off all the girls he tried to kiss on the way home from school. My dad had his own cure: A big handful of aspirins, put them in your mouth, get ‘em wet, chew them into a fine powder and let the juice slide down your sore throat. They’re sour, but they do the job.” (He was correct. And I use his remedy to this day.)

One day, I asked my grandpa what the old rubber sacks out in the horse barn were used for, the ones with tightening belts. “We used them as poultices,” he explained. If he sprained a wrist, his mother would make a concoction of stale bread and milk, pour it into the rubber bag, stick his wrist in, tighten the belt “and mother’s concoction sucked the pain out. If the injury was more serious, father took over and filled the sack with green cow manure and gave me a similar treatment.”

In need of contraception? Try my great aunt Olive Wood’s method. When asked by the fertile wife of a local doctor how Olive managed to be married for so long without giving birth, she replied, “I take one aspirin before bed and NOTHING after.” Bayer must be thankful for the Wood family’s loyalty.

As I matured, I got into the home remedy act, when my college roommates spent too much time of an evening slurping Walter’s beer at the Lake Hallie Ballroom. I dissuaded them from drinking tomato juice, the universal cure. Shame on them. It’s the worst thing you could do. Instead munch on a slice of last night’s now cold pizza and wash it down with a big bottle of Coca-Cola. It works every time.

And, lest I forget, it behooves me to mention some out-of-the-family home remedies, including a book I received for review from an author who prescribed a cayenne pepper rub to relieve hemorrhoids. OUCH!

And of course, we must remember, Rudolph Jackson, a Trempealeau County musician who played his cello at barn dances. During the last one I ever attended, I talked to Rudy during intermission: “Rudy, the last time we met, you weren’t playing your cello because of arthritis. Now you’re playing to beat the band. What happened?”

Rudy replied, “Ooh, ay vuss reely sick, but remembered that my pa had art-ritus tew and ate raw liver and vuss cured, so I bought myself a Waring Blender. Evry morning ay toss into it a half pound of beef liver and a little water and blend it into a slurry and drink it right out of the canister. And now I’m fine!”

Not to be outdone by a Norwegian fiddler, Mohandas Gandhi, leader of millions of Hindus and the proponent of nonviolent dissent had his own home remedy. Every morning, he drank a beaker of his own urine before sitting down to his spinning wheel and making deep philosophical pronouncements.

Dave would like to hear from you. Phone him at 715-426-9554.