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As
a boy, I sometimes spent the summers with my grandparents on their
small farm at Slocum, an Anderson County community supposedly named
because the mail delivery was "slow to come." |
During
one of my visits, I slipped into the hog pen to play with a batch
of new pigs. The mother sow resented the intrusion and as I climbed
over the fence to escape, I slipped against a protruding nail and
cut a gash in the center of my chest.
It wasn't a serious wound, but my grandmother sized up the situation
with alarm and summoned my grandfather. "Gus," she commanded, "fetch
some axle grease."
Grandfather Gus returned with a tin of grease, and my grandmother
spread it freely over the wound. The bleeding stopped immediately
and in a few hours she cleaned the wound, dabbed it with a little
coal oil, and tied a strip of white cloth around my chest. |
If
you grew up in the country, miles away from the nearest doctor, home
remedies were something you accepted routinely. Using axle grease
or coal oil for cuts probably made pretty good sense, especially if
you got well.
In 1996, we completed "Rub Onions and Skunk Oil on my Chest and
Call Me Well," a collection of home remedies and folk medicines.
Most of the contributions came from older people who used the folk
remedies themselves or remembered parents or grandparents who found
the home medicines an essential part of rural life in Texas. We discovered
a multitude of cures for warts, but they often fell more into the
realm of superstition than remedies.
Several people told us to rub our warts with a rooster comb, and bury
it.
Ruby Yount of Lufkin said her mother-in-law removed several warts
from her kids' hands, and it was all done in privacy. She tied a knot
of sewing thread over the wart, then went outside and buried it in
the earth. By the time the thread rotted, the wart was gone.
Some
other wart remedies include: "Warts"
> Page 2 |
Wart Removal
Wart
Removal Forum > Page 3
More about how
to get rid of warts - A Collection of Home Remedies for Warts, Wart
Treatments, Wart Cures, Natural Wart Remedies, Wart Removers, including
duct tapes, garlic, lemon rind, potato, cranberry, horse hair, band-aid,
castor oil, acid, snail, etc. for common warts, plantar warts, foot
warts, facial warts, skin warts, hand warts, finger warts, child
warts and more...
Anyone wishing to send their suggestions
for wart removal, please contact
us
Article © Bob Bowman. "All Things Historical" August 2000
column
Syndicated in 70 Texas newspapers
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