By JOEL WILSON
Did you know that sleeping with a bar of soap in the bed might reduce the chances of having a leg cramp during the night?
I didn’t until the better half informed me that it was in Dr. Gott’s column, which appears daily in the Times.
Apparently the good doctor often shares home remedies for what ails us.
It set me to thinking about some of the things my parents did for my minor health problems when I was growing up.
One of the home remedies I most remember was kerosene, or as we called it, coal oil. Since we often went barefoot in the summer, cuts and scrapes and every so often a rusty nail in the foot brought out the coal oil. Soak a rag and wrap the infected area. As you can imagine, I didn’t make many trips to the doctor’s office.
The reason my memory is so good about the coal oil is that I bear a nice scar from the time I tried to treat myself. Nobody was home but me on a summer day when I was playing in a ditch and accidentally slashed my right wrist on a piece of broken glass. I wrapped it up in a cloth soaked with coal oil and tried to keep it elevated to ease the bleeding.
When my mom got home, she took one look at the wrist and hustled me off to the doctor who sewed me up like laces on a football. From that experience, I learned that coal oil has limited curative value.
Being highly allergic to poison ivy, I went through a whole litany of treatments that included a bath in oatmeal, a bath in bleach (White Monday as I recall) and rub downs with vinegar. Sometimes after a week at Scout camp, I had to ride my bike to Dr. Marion’s house on our street for a shot of steroids.
Bee and wasp stings brought out the chewing tobacco or vinegar and soda. An ice cube wrapped in a washcloth can at least numb the afflicted skin.
Another home cure I remember well was wrapping a sore toe in a piece of bacon overnight. As I recall, that worked really well.
For an earache, mom would fill a small sock with table salt, heat the sock in an iron skillet and apply the hot salt sock to the offending ear. Sometimes she would put some hot mystery oil in the ear. I don’t know what it was but it helped.
A toothache produced another mystery oil. It tasted like cloves. That, in combination with the hot salt sock, worked wonders.
We kept a shelf in the bathroom filled with handy remedies like Vicks salve, Ben Gay, and that ever-popular Cloverine Salve. The Vicks was to rub on my chest for colds, with a smidge under the nose to help with the breathing. I hated that stuff. The Ben Gay was to rub on the temples for a headache. It also helped sore muscles and leg cramps. I wish I had known about sleeping with soap in those days because I didn’t like the Ben Gay either.
The Cloverine Salve was a magic formula good for a variety of ailments like minor cuts and burns. I got conned by a cousin into selling the stuff door to door one summer. Mom ended up with most of it and she used it up on me. It was about 95 percent petroleum based and like the Vicks and Ben Gay, was really greasy.
Until about the second grade, I was afflicted with the croup. My dad would take over when that happened. His treatment was to jerk me out of bed, wrap me in a quilt and rush me outside into the cold night air. Needless to say, I caught my breath. I finally had my tonsils removed by Dr. Weldon and that took care of the croup.
With seven children, my folks had to be inventive when it came to healthcare. Those were the days before health insurance, so every doctor’s visit came out of their pocket.
When I look back on it, I guess I had a pretty healthy childhood. And what with the bacon, Ben Gay and the Cloverine, I was likely the best lubicated kid on Cleveland Avenue.
