Taking My Medicine

IT is n’t any fun to be sick in a world gone science-mad. I’m like old Uncle Ab. ‘When I hurt, I wants t’ holler. An’ I want folks a-listenin’t’ me, too, by gosh!’

When I was a child in the Ozarks, there were compensations for being sick. I was allowed to sit in the biggest rocker, made cozy by covering it with thickly padded comforters. I had cinnamon toast and ‘scraped’ apples. I had personal attention. If I was very sick I was moved into the downstairs bedroom. Folks prayed for me at the meetinghouse. Yarb doctors brought me magic potions. Old mountain grannies muttered incantations to bring me back to health.

Nowadays, when my body revolts, I go to a clinic, where the doctor obviously is a very busy man. He gives me tests, asks a few questions in machine-gun style, and hands me a prescription, which I can’t read. There is a coldly inhuman air that offends me. If I am very sick I am shuttled off to a hospital, where I fill out blanks and become a room number and the nurses won’t even tell me my temperature.

I never really understand what is the matter with me and what I’m taking for it. If I get off with just a prescription, I sneak past the soda counter, the lunch booths, the perfume department, the liquor, cigarette, and magazine departments, to a hole in the wall where I hand my magic paper to a superior mortal and wait to receive a numbered bottle with austere instruction as to the use of the contents. Small wonder that I regard the medicine with disgust before the first dose goes down to fight my mysterious germs.

When I was a child, medicine was a familiar part of my life. Usually it was purchased from the ‘medicine man’ who drove through the Ozark hills in a square, black, high-topped ‘ medicine wagon. ’ He sold spices and stock remedies, hair tonics, bay rum, and cosmetics; he was a traveling drug store and novelty department. He told us the gossip of the countryside and what our neighbors had bought. If we had no cash, he left the stuff anyhow, and said we could pay him next trip. He hated to think of our home without a bottle of his new vanilla extract or his marvelous roup cure. Sometimes he took eggs or chickens in payment.

We stood in the doorway and watched his black wagon going down the road. Momentarily the peddler had brought us in touch with the outside world. We envied him his glamorous, vagabond existence. To have the medicine man stay all night and regale us with his experiences was a treat. We never charged him, but usually he left a present — a bottle of cake coloring or a bottle of liquid powder.

Sickness was a community affair then. When someone was ‘took bad’ the news traveled over the neighborhood via the party line. All the neighbors came in to sit up and bring delicacies. Warmth and relaxation spread through the worried household when a car rattled into the back yard. Aunt Mandy Cotton usually was the first to arrive. She came in laden with supplies, took charge of the kitchen, put the other children to bed, cooked the meals, sent the washing to another neighbor, and generally brought order out of chaos.

‘There, there,’ she’d say to the worried mother. ’You jest set down an’ take it easy. Ferd and Lizzie’ll set up till midnight and then Amos and Dora’s a-comin’ over. I’ll jest give these dishes a lick and a promise.’

More folks would come in and sit around the kitchen stove, talking in lowered voices about what Veit Pyatt said when he was ‘out of his haid that time’ and how it required six men to hold old Jack Carter when he took the fever.

The farm folks were capable nurses. The men could turn the patients tenderly with their work-roughened hands. The women, with infinite patience and kindness, managed everything from childbirth to typhoid fever.

The home remedies appealed to me much more than things out of a ninety-eight-cent bottle from the drug store. When I had a cold, I licked a spoon containing a syrup made by boiling cockleburs and sugar and vinegar; or else I was given a treat of horehound candy made by my grandmother. My chest was covered with hot turpentine and lard arid soft flannel. Perhaps I was given a weak whiskey toddy, or, if I had croup, a spoonful of kerosene. If my throat was sore, a stocking was tied around it. That meant I was to be treated gently and might get to stay home from school.

Burned whiskey was given for the colic. The whiskey was poured into a saucer and ignited. I liked to watch the flame and then have the pleasant excitement of drinking the remainder.

A tonic was n’t just a mixture from the drug store. It was essence of the woods. We had tonics of sassafras, poplar, wild cherry, and white ash bark. Yarb doctors made them. Chestnut-leaf tea was given for whooping cough. Wild peppergrass and dandelion made good blood medicine.

Parsley and wintergreen leaves were good for kidney trouble, according to mountain herbalists. There were all sorts of teas, from ‘sheep tea,’ made of sheep manure and used to ‘bring out the measles,’ to white oak bark tea, used as a gargle for sore throats.

In the spring we drank the pale, rosy brew of sassafras tea to thin our blood. If I had boils, I ate raisins and applied sulphur and lard to the eruptions. When I sprained my wrist, it was bound with vinegar and mud. When I had poison ivy, I mashed up peach leaves and applied them. Fat meat was bound over splinters and sores to ‘ bring them to a head.’ Bran, bread and milk, or onion poultices were supposed to ‘draw pizen out.’

Of course, there were a lot of ‘cures’ that we sniffed at. Our family did n’t believe that a sty on the eye could be cured by rubbing a black cat’s tail across it nine times.

We did put a pan of water under the bed for night sweats and wore asafetida bags around our necks during flu epidemics to keep germs away. But we scoffed at curing chills by tying a yarn string around a persimmon tree with as many knots in the string as there had been chills. We called the doctor for the ‘shakes and fevers’ and he dosed us with pills, which we swallowed inside canned cherries. The doctor was a kindly old man who gave us empty pillboxes with fascinating color stripes, let us look at the long tubes of medicine, and asked my father if he’d rather wait until the corn crop was in before payment.

The modern methods of medicine are undoubtedly better. But I miss the old personal element. When I’m sick I want the equivalent of the big rocker with its soft, worn comforter, the cinnamon toast, and the juicy, pulverized flesh of Winesap apples patiently scraped by knife.

Science is all very well, but I miss Aunt Mandy smoothing my forehead and saying, ‘Hush, child.’ I want the comforting sight of a familiar face by my bed at night, the cozy yellow glow of a turned-down kerosene lamp, shielded on my side by a folded newspaper. I want my pills in canned cherries!