Grandma’s Home Remedies

We may look back on life a hundred or more years ago as idyllic, stress-free and romantic, but for many of our ancestors, it was a dreary round of poverty, grinding toil, and frequent illness. For our rural ancestors, the doctor was many long miles away by horseback.  Those available were often lacking in medical education and probably did more harm than good.  They didn’t know, or ignored, basic hygiene, spreading germs from one patient to the next.  My father and his mother, Catherine Kaiser Trausch, often said, “The further away you stay from doctors, the better off you’ll be.”  Many times, people made do by doctoring themselves with what they had on hand.  If a doctor was called, it was usually after all home remedies had failed, and by then it was often too late.  However, without modern drugs and surgical techniques, doctors could do little more than Grandma with her home remedies.

Most women used remedies passed down from their mothers and grandmothers. Goose grease was an ingredient in many of them.  It was smeared on hands and faces to prevent chapping, combined with turpentine or kerosene to be rubbed on chests and throats for colds, and applied to burns and blisters.

Lavina Clark, wife of Silas “Doc” Clark of Juniata, (brother of Grandma Clarice Clark Renschler Bugg) told me that her mother used goose grease because it was “greasier’ than lard. Her mother combined goose grease and turpentine for a chest rub to loosen congestion.  She also remembered her mother making a cold medicine by combining raw onions, lots of sugar, and a few drops of turpentine, placing it on the back of the cook stove, and letting it set until it turned into a syrup.  This syrup was good for colds and coughs.

Then, like now, there seemed to be more remedies for the miseries of colds and chest congestion than for any other ailments. If my Dad felt a cold coming on, he rubbed his neck,  chest, and back with Mentholatum, took a good shot of whiskey, and went to bed to “sweat it out.”  There was a firm belief that the stronger or more unpleasant the remedy, the better. 

Mustard plasters, strong enough to take the skin off, and substitute a new pain for the original, were often used.  To make a mustard plaster, take a small amount of ground mustard, combine it with a little flour and water to make a paste.  Spread the paste on a cloth, cover with another cloth and put on the chest until the skin turns red.  If left on too long, it will blister the skin.  My Grandmother, Leona Bassett Kline, told me that when Grandpa Dan Kline broke a rib, he thought a mustard plaster would help relieve the pain.  The heat felt so good, he left the plaster on too long.  When it was removed, the skin came with it, leaving a big sore. Grandma Leona Kline also remembered onion poultices. Fry onions in a small amount of lard, spread between cloths, and lay on the chest while hot.  Cover up, leave on until cold, and repeat.  She remarked that the onions stunk.  “We put up with a lot.”  She also remembered her father, Jule Bassett, making cough syrup.  In the fall, he would take a bottle of whiskey, add rock candy and “some kind of oil,” and shake.  “We took a couple of spoonsful whenever we had a cough.”

One can imagine a desperate mother, whose baby is ill using what she had on hand, trying to cure her sick child. Home-made cough medicine, onion or mustard plasters, goose grease; whether it was the remedies, the mother’s tender loving care and prayers, or just luck, if the baby survived, from that time on, the mother swore by her remedy. If someone wasn’t feeling well, many mothers would remark, “All he needs is a good physic.” A physic is any medicine or medicinal herb, and the word was often synonymous with laxative.

In addition to being an ingredient in cold medicines, whiskey was also used as a pain reliever. In a December 1984 interview with my Mother, Edna Kline Trausch, she told this story.  “Just before prohibition began, my Dad bought a quart [of whiskey] and he sealed it with wax and put it in the attic in case somebody got sick.  And somebody did, the neighbor’s boy got really bad, and the doctor said if they could find some whiskey, it might help.  The neighbor came over and asked Dad, and he went up to the attic and dragged the bottle down, melted off the wax, broke the seal, and gave them some.  The boy died the next day.  He had a really bad sinus infection.  They gave the whiskey to him to kill the pain.”

In a 1982 interview, my great-aunt, Elizabeth Kaiser Pittz, told me about the remedies her parents, Nicholas and Susanna Theisen Kaiser, used. “For colds, she used goose grease; Mother raised geese. She rendered the fat from the geese, and put that on our chest; put a cloth over it.  I think she put a little turpentine in the grease.  We didn’t like it, that goose grease had an awful smell to it.  It warmed a little; I think the turpentine did that.  Mother made onion plasters.  Fried onions, put them between cloths, and put them on.    My Dad took half whiskey and half sugar, shook that up so the sugar dissolved, we got a tablespoon of that for a cough.  If you had an upset stomach, they had spirit of peppermint, fix that with sugar and water.  That was good for diarrhea.    Mother used to raise a plant that she dried and made into a tea for a physic.  It was a little bush that got little white flowers on.  In German, she called it Cinna Blatter.  (Cinna leaves)  If you didn’t feel good, that was the first thing she would think of, a good physic.      My Mother’s sister and brother died from diphtheria or scarlet fever when they [the Peter Theisen family] were in Minnesota, but she never talked much about it.  Some said they used kerosene on a feather and put it down the throat for diphtheria.  My Mother never did that.  Mrs. Peter Eltz would do that.  She used to get the kerosene, take a chicken feather, and swab the throat with it.  My folks knew the Eltz family from St. Donatus.  Grandma and Grandpa Theisen used to visit Eltz when they came out from Iowa.”

Most families had a recipe for a medicinal salve. The Ron Wright family still uses a salve they call “Grandmother’s Salve,” which has been handed down in his family for four generations.  According to family tradition, Great-Grandmother Adeline Schnase had a goiter.  She consulted an Indian Doctor who gave her the following recipe.  Mix equal parts beeswax, sheep’s tallow, and castor oil.  To this add 1/3 part resin.  Place the mixture in the top of a double boiler with water in the bottom part.  Melt together over low heat.  Bottle.  Whether this helped the goiter is unknown.  The salve is still used to this day for slivers and stickers as it has a good drawing quality.  Another drawing remedy is the skin of an egg.  Break an egg, remove the skin, and place it on splinters, boils, etc.  Leave on until dry, repeat.  Bread and milk were also used to draw.

Clarice Clark Bugg recalled a remedy her mother used for burns. “When I was very small, I was badly burned.  My parents feared I might die.  We were in a wagon train going to Arkansas, and no doctor was available.  My mother found some cattails, pulled off the fuzz, mixed it with castor oil, and bound it to the burn.  It healed, but I had a scar for many years.”

Some mothers also attempted not only to cure the disease but also to prevent it. Many children wore asafetida bags.  These were a cloth bag on a string worn about the neck.  The bag contained one or more foul-smelling substances.  These were thought to ward off disease.  They may have worked to a small degree, as they stunk so terribly that no one could get close.  Leona Bassett Kline recalls, “They were put on in the fall when we put on our winter underwear.  Oh, how we hated that sack!  We covered it up as deep with our clothes as we could – it stunk so!”  She recalls that most of the children in her school wore one.  One can’t help but feel sorry for that teacher.

My Dad, Bert Trausch, reminisced about a remedy for poison ivy. He had gone to his Dad’s farm two miles north of Holstein to get prairie hay.  He was up on top of the rack tramping the hay down, and he got poison ivy on his legs from the dry hay.  Bert went to Dr. Mace at Roseland, and his remedy only made the poison ivy worse.  Mrs. Ben Theisen told him to use permanganate of potash liquid on his legs, and it dried the poison ivy right up. During the 1920s, potassium permanganate was used as a remedy for chicken cholera.  It is a water-soluble salt that, when dissolved, turns water purple.  It is a potent oxidizing agent that was used as a disinfectant and a water treatment.

Some of these remedies undoubtedly worked, some were useless, and some may have been harmful. The sight or smell of some home remedies must have been enough to work a miraculous recovery, even in a really sick child.  The primary ingredient in many remedies was tender loving care.  In the days when doctors knew little more than the general population, remedies were an important factor in the family’s health.  The remedies themselves stand as a testament to the ingenuity of our ancestors.