Notation: These are just for fun! While these were actually published in old books, we exercise not recommend that you lot attempt them! They really could exist unsafe!

I smile to think of what they used
To aid us kids survive,
Just I am "going on" 69
And very much alive.
My sorest throats were eased, and I
Even so hold no fleck of rancor
To think of sucking sugar lumps
With a drop or two of camphor.

And camphor mixed with goose grease for
A winter chest congestion;
Baking soda cleaned my teeth
And helped my indigestion.
Because of Mother'due south tender heart
I hereby sing a Gloria!
She never gave me castor oil,
Just syrupy Castoria.

Table salt for all mosquito bites,
Cobwebs on the scratches,

The sickroom fumigated with
Our sulfur kitchen matches.
Somehow there'south quite a agglomeration of us
That never had a shot,
But hither we are still kicking
And enjoying it a lot.

– Author Unknown

These are just for fun!!!  I remember when you read them you volition run into that.

These one-time-fourth dimension remedies, collected from a variety of sources, may have actually been used by old-timers or may have just been myth and legends.

We do non recommend that you employ these remedies. But, just in case you get a wild hair and decide to endeavor ane, exist forewarned, some of these may very well exist dangerous! If y'all attempt them, you do so at your own adventure. Better yet, just DON'T try them!!

Acne

  • Launder your face with a wet diaper.
  • Mix 3 teaspoons of honey into 8 ounces of apple cider. Rub on face several times daily.

Anemia

  • Eat raw liver and drink fresh blood.

Ant Bites

  • Take a dip of snuff and rub the fresh dipped snuff on the seize with teeth.

 Appendicitis

  • Tie a leather thong around your waist and the appendicitis will enter the thong. Take the thong and necktie it around a tree and the sickness volition enter the tree.

Arthritis

  • Dissolve 3/4 teaspoon powder pectin (or 1-tablespoon liquid pectin) in a glass of purple grape juice. Drink one time a day. This is from an Amish physician and nigh 60% of the people who attempt information technology say it really works. The liquid dissolves better than the powder.
  • Have a expressionless cat into the forest to a hollow stump that has spunk in it. Twirl the cat overhead and so toss the cat to the south. Walk abroad north but do not wait dorsum.
  • Carry a spud in your pocket. It will not rot, but harden equally it absorbs the arthritis.
  • Tie a strip of fabric soaked in turpentine around the limb.

Asthma

  • If a kid has asthma stand him up against a tree and drive a blast in the tree an inch above his caput. If the child grows an inch in the adjacent yr, the asthma will disappear.
  • Eat lots of carrots.
  • Mix 1 tablespoon of salt in 1/2 cup strong cider vinegar. Eat 1-one-half spoonful every ten seconds until gone.
  • Wear a muskrat skin on the chest with the fur next to the chest.

Alopecia/Thinning Hair

  • Smear your head with fresh cow manure.
  • For thinning hair brand a solution of salt and h2o and comb through hair every day until you see hair becoming thicker.
  • To prevent thinning and baldness, never cutting the hair in the light of the moon.

Beard Growing

  • The Liquid obtained from boiling quondam boots was used to promote the growth of hair on the confront of young men—an attempt to announced more masculine.

Bee Stings

  • Mix up honey and dirt dauber's nest and rub it on the sting.

Boils

  • Catch a chaparral bird (roadrunner) in the early morning. Kill and consume information technology and the boil will go away.
  • Soak a small department of heel of homemade white breadstuff in boiling water. Squeeze with back of spoon. Lay on sterile gauze or boiled textile. Add pinch baking soda (ane/4 tsp). Mix with soaked staff of life, wrap in gauze and utilize to affected surface area.
  • Applying meat fatty, raw potatoes, war sauerkraut or yellow lye lather to the boil will bring it to a head.

Burns

  • Employ water ice wrapped in damp washcloth until pain stops. No scaring volition occur.
  • Go to the lot and brand a calf go up and defecate. Put the feces in a flour sack and embrace the burn with it. Exit information technology on until the next forenoon.
  • Apply strong tea to the burned area.

Cancer – Preventing

  • Eat three almonds a solar day and you will not dice from cancer.

Chills

  • Take a new broom and sweep across his/chills back in the sign of a cross.

Colds – Curing

  • Catching leaves in your paw, which fall from the trees in the autumn, will cure a head common cold.

Colds – Preventing

  • Eat an onion sandwich and wash your hair.

Colic

  • Close the windows and doors of the babe'due south room and take the begetter keep smoking a pipage or cigar.

Coughs

  • Put some cow dung in water and bring it to a boil. Gargle the h2o 3 times a day and your cough will be gone.
  • Bake onions and pour all the juice from the baked onions into a glass and beverage.

Wolcott's Instant Pain Annihilator

Wolcott's Instant Pain Annihilator, 1863 advertisement

Crick in the Neck

  • Become downwards to the hog pen and find where a hog has rubbed his neck against the contend, then rub your neck in the same spot.

Croup

  • Pack sheep debris into a tobacco sack and soak in warm water. Utilize the sack to your neck and habiliment information technology until the choking spell is over.

Cuts

  • Pack the cut in beam grease.
  • Take a large regular army pismire and apply him to the cut, then that he takes hold of each side of the wound with his pincers. Cut his head off from his torso, leaving his head to agree the cutting together.
  • Apply spider's web to a haemorrhage cut.

For "real" old fashioned remedies, check out:

Native American and Other Aboriginal Remedies

Herbs & Healing Properties

Note: These are just for fun! While these were really published in one-time books, nosotros practice non recommend that you try them! They actually could be dangerous!

The Doctor, 1919

The Doctor, 1919. Click for prints, downloads and products.

Dandruff

  • To i quart of water, add one ounce of sulphur.  Shake very well very two hours and saturate the head every morn with the liquid.  Dandruff will disappear, leaving pilus bright and sleeky.

Diarrhea

  • Eat several coconut cookies (some say this really works.)

Earache

  • Have someone blow tobacco smoke into the ear v times while saying, "Injure, hurt, go abroad; go into a bale of hay."

Fever

  • Get together a supply of rabbit dung and make a potent tea of the dung in hot water.  Strain and drink the tea every half 60 minutes until the sweating stops.

Flu

  • To cure the influenza, put sulphur in your shoes.

Pes Gone to Sleep

  • Wet your finger with spit and put the sign of the cross on the sole of your foot.

Freckles

  • To get rid of freckles, get up at five-xxx on Sunday morning time and go exterior.  If there is a lot of dew get your hands real moisture in the grass.  Rub the dew on your face and turn around nine times, saying, "Dew, dew, practice, do, accept my freckles; habiliment 'em on yous; dew, dew, thank yous."  Say this nine times while turning around.  Do not launder the dew off and do not launder your confront until the next day.
  • To remove freckles or skin spots — take a minor flatfish fresh from the bounding main and hold it firmly against the pare until the fish dies.  This volition as well cure the whooping cough

Headache

  • Sleep with a pair of pair of scissors under your pillow.  The next morning time the headache will exist gone.

Hiccups

  • Hold your artillery to a higher place your caput and pant like a dog.
  • Take a potable of water while standing on your head.
  • Stick your caput underwater and count to 20-five.
  • Put your head between your legs and look at the dominicus

Ingrown Toenail

  • Tie a cadger's liver to a leather string.  Have the leather string and tie it around your left talocrural joint.  The ingrown toenail will disappear in nine days.

Lice

  • Outset, put your clothes on an anthill.  Then wash your caput in kerosene.  Spring your caput with sea salt and and then, departing the hair, pour raw whiskey on your scalp.  Let it stay for 48 hours.  Do non smoke or go nearly the fire.

C.F. Simmons Medicine Co., 1886

C.F. Simmons Medicine Co., Liver Medicine, Female Remedy, cures indigestion, colic, and more, 1886 advertisement

Liver Trouble

  • Take one-half of a white turnip and half of a purple turnip and tie together with a white cord.  Urinate on it.  Hang this on the bedpost of the bed on the first night, and then on the foot post the second night until you circle the bed.

Measles

  • Put burned cornmeal in a tobacco bag and hang it effectually the neck.

Mumps

  • Tie a black sock effectually your neck.  To keep mumps from going down on a male child, tie a red cloth around his waist.

Nosebleed

  • Every nighttime pour a bucket of cold h2o over your caput.  Proceed this up for 14 days and you will exist cured.
  • Have a piece of cord and brand nine knots in it

Pain

  • Find a rock that is partly covered with clay.  Remove the stone from its resting place and spit on the lesser or covered side. Replace the rock in the same hole exactly as you found information technology.

Perspiration

  • People who perspire a lot should use a teaspoonful of ammonia in bathwater. Alum, borax or ammonia added to bathwater is also constructive.

Poison Ivy (oak, sumac, etc)

  • Make a paste from fels naptha lather and apply. Do not cover. Let it dry and flake off by itself. One awarding normally does the job. This from the 1930's.

Poor Eyesight

  • Pierced ears assist cure poor eyesight
  • The offset snow to fall in May is good for sore eyes

Pneumonia

  • Tansey is a yellow bloom that blooms on a leafy stem about ii anxiety tall.  It usually grew wild in the local gardens.  The stem, flowers and all were gathered, deposited in some kind of bag, and hung up to dry.  Then when needed they were crushed and made into hop poultices for application to the chest and/or back of a person suffering from pneumonia

Rabies

  • Sear the bite with a hot iron to keep from going crazy.

Rash

  • Employ the juice of the Aloe Vera leaf to the rash.  If it is a balderdash nettle rash, all yous have to do is urinate on information technology.

Ringworm

  • Find a blackness-headed daughter between the ages of twelve and 16 and have her remove her correct shoe.  At present rub her large toe well over the ringworm for almost ane infinitesimal.  Within a week the ringworm will have disappeared.
  • Accept the best Cuba cigars; smoke one a sufficient length of time to accumulate well-nigh an inch of ash upon the end of the cigar.  Wet the whole surface of the ringworm with saliva so rub the ashes from the cigar thoroughly into and over the sore.
  • Circling ringworm with one's wedding ceremony ring and crossing it iii times will surely cure it.

Annotation: These are merely for fun! While these were actually published in old books, we practise not recommend that you try them! They really could be dangerous!

A Sick Chum, 1908

A Sick Chum, 1908. Click for prints, downloads and products.

Sore Eyes

  • Catch some bedbugs and beat them. Mix with common salt and homo milk. Rub this mixture on the eyes dark and morn.

Sore Throat

  • Have a blackness thread, tie ix knots in it, and wear it around your neck for 9 days.
  • Heat coarse salt in a cast fe frying pan; make full hand knit wool stocking with heated salt. Run up acme of stocking together. Hold around the neck with large rubber pin.
  • Tie a piece of fatback on a string and eat the fatback, pulling information technology upwardly again past the cord. Echo several times.
  • To preclude catching strep throat, burn orangish peels on the damper and inhale while they are called-for.
  • Mix turpentine from a fir tree with saccharide and swallow it.
  • Eat molasses processed made with a pocket-size corporeality of kerosene oil. Some people but boiled molasses and kerosene oil (or Minard's Liniment) and took a couple of spoonfuls every few hours.
  • Rub kerosene oil and butter on the throat and chest.

Sprains

  • Take a dirt dauber'southward nest and brand a mud out of it with vinegar. Daub it on the sprain and wrap a stocking around it.

Breadbasket Ache/Cramps

  • Cut some hair off from behind the right ear in the light of the moon. And so throw it over your right shoulder
  • .Lie across a barrel and roll until your easily impact the ground on ane side, then push button with your easily and roll back until your anxiety touch the ground on the other side. Repeat several times.
  • A teaspoon of basis ginger in a glass of sweetened boiling water, sipped while very hot is a cure for stomach pain.

Stuttering

  • Hit the person stuttering in the rima oris with a craven gizzard.

Warts(Warts were obviously a trouble, considering there are lots of these.)

  • Make a paste of baking soda and spirits of camphor and apply every night. Comprehend with a cast. Remove in morning. Removes all kinds of warts, even stubborn planter'south warts that resist every "medical" treatment. This is from another Edgar Cayce reading.
  • Rub the wart with a rock. Put the rock in a tobacco sack and throw it over your left shoulder.
  • Rub the wart with a piece of bacon that has been stolen from a neighbor.
  • Catch a frog and rub him on the wart
  • Walk out into the road afterwards night when you tin encounter the moon. Run around three times and spit over your right shoulder.
  • Accept a tick from a dog and let the tick fleck the wart. In two or three days the wart should be gone. Then put the tick back on the canis familiaris.
  • Cut bark from a tree and rub it on the warts. And so record the bark back on the tree. By the time it grows on over again, the warts should take gone.
  • Rub fatback on your warts and give it to a dog. If he eats the fatty back, the warts volition get abroad
  • Tie a equus caballus hair effectually each wart and within a calendar week all the warts will autumn off
  • Rub fatback over the warts and throw it over your left shoulder. Don't look to run across where it goes. If an animal eats the fatback, your warts will disappear.
  • Utilize chalk to warts; with same slice of chalk marking X over the oven door for each wart. As the chalk burns off, the warts will disappear.
  • Bathe warts occasionally for a week or and then in water in which potatoes have been boiled.
  • When you go to church building, make the sign of the cantankerous over your warts three times.
  • Light a match , let it burn a picayune, then blow it out, bear upon the burnt end to wart and become someone to hid the lucifer
  • Put butter on wart and have a cat lick it.
  • Warts can be cured by touching each one with a piece of string and and then tying knots in the string — one knot for each wart. The string is cached in the ground, and when the cord rots the warts disappear.
  • Another cure for warts is the bathe them in h2o institute in a low in a rock, at the same time saying "In the name of the Father, son, and Holy Ghost." This but works if you come beyond such a stone accidentally — it'due south no proficient if y'all get out looking for the rock.
  • Apply snail to warts.

Frontier Slang, Lingo & Phrases Book by Kathy Weiser-Alexander

At present IN A BOOK Course
More Terms, Expanded Definitions + Reverse Lookup + More than Pictures

Whooping Cough

  • Put some hair from the person on a piece of bread exterior the kitchen door where the moon can shine on information technology. If a dog comes along and eats it, the cough will be cured in five days.
  • Take hold of hold of a table leg when cough.
  • Place a pan of fresh chicken debris nether the bed.

Compiled and edited past Kathy Weiser/Legends of America, updated March 2020.

Notation: These are only for fun! While these were actually published in old books, we do non recommend that you try them! They really could exist unsafe!

For "real" old fashioned remedies, check out:

Native American and Other Aboriginal Remedies

Herbs & Healing Backdrop

You may besides like:

Frontier Recipes – The 'Existent' Old Stuff from the Old West