Mountain Folk Remedies: The Foxfire Americana Library (9) (12 page)

K
ENNY
R
UNION

Mix alum powder and honey together in a bowl. Take a teaspoonful when you start coughing.

F
LORENCE
C
ARPENTER

Make a chestnut leaf tea. Add enough brown sugar to make into a syrup. Take four times weekly.

E
LIZABETH
E
NDLER

Mix honey with lemon juice or alum.

Or mix olive oil with laudanum.

Or make a tea from holly tree berries, adding honey and sweet oil.

Or boil a hornet’s nest to make a tea, adding lemon juice and honey.

Or mix lemon juice, salt, brown sugar and olive oil; give one teaspoon several times a day.

Or boil together one pound brown sugar, one ounce paregoric, and one cup water. Let cool and add one pint whiskey [Mrs. Pinson recommended the “good old kind”]. This is good for any kind of cough.

M
RS
. C. E. P
INSON

Gargle with warm salty water. If the baby is too little to gargle, just give it a little bit and just let it slide down.

F
LORA
Y
OUNGBLOOD

Drop turpentine on a teaspoonful of sugar. Mix together. Give it according to age. If they’re one year, give ’em one drop and it’s a drop for every year till he gets on up pretty good size. Give that for three mornings. Also run turpentine on the child’s navel. That’s where the worms come up to and they’ll hang there. They’ll bite down on the child and that makes the child grumble with a stomachache. That turpentine will make them turn loose and the child will pass ’em. This remedy is used mostly for pinworms.

A
NONYMOUS

Use the root of samson snakeroot. The roots are pink and measure six to eight inches long. Use three to four roots for each dose. Boil the roots in a small amount of water until the water turns a yellowish brown color. The tea can then be sweetened with syrup.

S
AMANTHA
S
PEED

Get the seeds out of a Jerusalem oak and boil them in syrup until it makes a candy. Give the person with worms a piece of the candy every other day.

F
LORENCE
C
ARPENTER

Gather red sassafras bush roots. Boil about a half a cup to a quart of water and drink the tea.

L
AURA
P
ATTON

Yellowroot tea will get rid of worms in children. Boil about one half cup of small roots to one and a half quarts of water. Let boil until about one quart of water is left. Strain and drink about a half a cup every day.

L
AURA
P
ATTON

Eat gourd seeds for worms.

B
ARNARD
D
ILLARD

Dampen a wool rag with turpentine. Heat the rag and lay it on the navel and rub it on the neck.

S
AMANTHA
S
PEED

Drink apple cider often.

V
ON
W
ATTS

Make a tea from yellowroot or soak the roots in whiskey. (Whiskey is good because it draws the strength from root and it won’t go bad if you set back for a while.) Then drink some.

A
NONYMOUS

You make a little cross with a razor blade right between the shoulders. You put a little funnel or any little suction cup over that and draw out the blood. Then you get the blood up in a spoon and weaken it down with a bit of water. Some babies you can give a teaspoonful and some babies it’ll be a half. That’ll cure the jaundice. I’ve seen it done, but I never did do it. Mine never did have it.

F
LORA
Y
OUNGBLOOD

So far in this section, we have shown you different types of herb remedies that were used, and are still being used, in the southern Appalachians. However, these people did not always depend solely on home remedies. By the mid 1800s there were also a few qualified physicians in their area.

On an earlier visit with two of our frequent contacts, Mr. and Mrs. John Bulgin, they mentioned to us that Mr. Bulgin’s grandfather, Alexander Crutchfield Brabson, had been a doctor. The Bulgins have a collection of operating tools
that Dr. Brabson actually used and a ledger of accounts from his practice. One interesting point about the ledger is the manner in which many patients paid Dr. Brabson for his services. The payments to him were often made not in money, but in things such as animals and produce from his patients’ farms and gardens, homemade quilts, or services. To get a more detailed account of Dr. Brabson and his practice, during July of 1984 Cheryl Wall and I went to the Bulgins’ home in Franklin, North Carolina, about thirty minutes from Rabun Gap.

The Bulgins’ home is a large, modern two-story house built on top of a hill. It is surrounded by several barns, workshops, and a small greenhouse. Mrs. Bulgin has filled the house with antiques—especially clocks. On the hour, the house almost seems to quake with the chiming of the many clocks in the living room.

We sat in the Bulgins’ large, sunny kitchen during the interview. As we talked at the oak breakfast table, Mrs. Bulgin would occasionally wipe the counters of the clean, bright-colored cooking area. The windows from the kitchen look out upon the backyard where several birds pecked at the seed thrown out for them.

When we settled down to the interview, Mr. Bulgin surprised us with some new information: not only was his grandfather a doctor, but so was Dr. Brabson’s father-in-law, Dr. G. N. Rush. Dr. Brabson studied medicine under Dr. Rush and later attended Emory University, and they both served in the Civil War. Together, they perfected a cure for a usually fatal disease called milk sickness.

Mr. Bulgin said that Dr. Brabson was devoted to his work. No matter how bad the weather or what other obstacle stood in his way, it seemed that he was always able to get to his patients to treat them.

Mr. Bulgin is a tall, lean man in his early eighties. On the day we visited with him, he had been working in his metal shop, so he was wearing a baggy pair of army-green workpants and a matching workshirt. His large, knobby hands are strong and skillful-looking. His ruddy face is oblong and wrinkled from a combination of sun and age. Behind thick, black-rimmed glasses is a pair of eyes that are full of life and laughter and he grins impishly.

Mr. and Mrs. Bulgin, as always, were enthusiastic and eager to talk to us, and the following is the result of our most recent visit.

ALLISON ADAMS

John Bulgin
: My great-granddad’s name was G. N. Rush. [He became a doctor when he graduated from] the University of Nashville in the Republic of Tennessee before it became a state. The date was 1854 the best I can make it out on his diploma. That diploma is actually on the skin of a sheep, and it’s all in Latin. He was an ordained elder in the Ebenezer Presbyterian Church and later at
Morrison Presbyterian Church (which still exists) from which he retired.

I
LLUSTRATION 33
John Bulgin showed Cheryl Wall Dr. Rush’s medical kit:
   “[These medical tools] were Dr. Rush’s graduation present. He graduated in 1854, so they’re at least that old. I’ve found one set [of medical tools] like this in a museum in Raleigh [North Carolina], but it’s not as complete as this one. There’s even a tourniquet and one of the needles in here. I don’t know how they kept [the tools] clean. Doctors have told me they used carbonic acid.
   “Dr. Rush gave this [medical equipment] to my uncle in Cornelia. Then my mother said, seeing that I was the oldest grandson, she wanted me to have [the kit]. So some of ’em gave it to me.”

Dr. Rush was in the Civil War. He had his degree then. I still have his watch. It has a hunting case and a key, and it still runs and is in good shape. He would carry it in his vest pocket with the key on it.

My grandfather’s name was Alexander Crutchfield Brabson—Dr. A. C. Brabson. I wish I had been old enough to remember him, but I was about four years old when he died in 1916. He was in the Civil War, too. Of course he was quite a bit younger than Dr. Rush. They
were both medical aides for the South. After the war, when they came to this area from Washtown, Tennessee, they settled about eight miles from Franklin in what they used to call Riverside.

Grandpa Brabson read medicine and studied it under Dr. Rush. He then went to Emory University [before it was named Emory]. He lived where Bryant McClure’s restaurant is in Otto, North Carolina. He lived right across the ridge from [where the restaurant is now] within hollering distance, nearly. That old house is still standing.

I
LLUSTRATION 34

Mrs. Bulgin
: John’s grandfather and grandmother were considered to be the affluent society. They had a nice home, they had plenty of food, and they had house servants, but how they got the money to pay for them, I don’t know. He didn’t get any fee, hardly, for what he did. He didn’t question whether [patients] had money or didn’t. I’m sure he knew that if they had money, they would pay him, and if they didn’t have money [it didn’t matter]. They still needed something done for them.

John’s grandmother used to have one woman that came and moved in during the wintertime. She’d come right after Christmas or around the first of January and stay with them through the winter months. I’m not sure whether she was an old maid or whether she was a widow, but she didn’t have a family. She’d sew, quilt, card wool, spin,
and weave. John’s grandparents had seven children—a big family—so his grandmother didn’t have time to do all the mending and all the darning of socks and all of that. John’s mother, Blanche Brabson, was second to the oldest of the children.

I’ve heard her talk about some of the remedies [Dr. Brabson used], but I never used them except one for yellowjacket stings. When my kids would get stung in the yard, I’d make a poultice with three or four plantain leaves—wet them and tie them on the sting with a cloth. It’d take the sting and the swelling out.

We cannot conceive of the hardships [they faced back then]. Diphtheria was a big killer in those days. If that hit, there wasn’t a thing anybody could do about it. They usually didn’t live long after they contracted diphtheria. [Dr. Brabson had a lot of cases of] that as well as scarlet fever and typhoid fever. They also used to have a disease called milk sickness. People got it from using the milk of [infected cows]. Cures were rare, but Dr. Rush and Dr. Brabson perfected a treatment for it, and Dr. Brabson taught the cure to Dr. Neville from Dillard, Georgia, and he taught it to two or three other doctors around here. But the actual remedy they used has been lost now. [It died with those doctors.]
^*

John Bulgin
: Grandpa Brabson worked mostly out of his house. He had a horse and buggy that he went to Hayesville in. He probably had to stay the night somewhere before he got to Hayesville because it’s about forty miles from here. During a childbirth, he’d have to maybe spend the night or a couple of days at the home according to how the patient got along.

His favorite words were, “Ye old son of a bitch.” He would tell
them, “Ye old son of a bitch, you ain’t gonna die! They ain’t no use of you coming to see me.”