Mountain Folk Remedies: The Foxfire Americana Library (9) (13 page)
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Authors: Edited by Foxfire Students
I
LLUSTRATION 35
An old photo of Dr. and Mrs. Brabson which was hanging in Mr. and Mrs. Bulgin’s home.
But I don’t reckon he ever turned anybody down. He didn’t think of it. I remember a story about a guy somebody shot. He was stealing stuff out of a man’s garden. I don’t know the particulars, but it was dark and he ran and got caught in a cockleburr patch. The [owner] shot him with a shotgun. It was pouring down rain and a guy come in the middle of the night after Grandpa. He told the guy he wasn’t gonna go see that old son of a bitch [because] he wasn’t worth saving. But Mama said that all the time [he was saying that], he was getting up and putting on his clothes. He told the man to go over to the barn and “catch Alec and put the saddle on,” and he rode over there and scooped out the cockleburrs and sewed that man up, and he lived.
And I remember Mama telling about him coming home from Hayesville late at night or in the early morning hours when it was real cold and raining. His feet would be frozen to the stirrups and he couldn’t get off. He’d ride up right in front of the house and she would take a kettle of water out and pour on his shoes to loosen them so he could get them out of the stirrups. If he was lucky, he got two dollars for that call, wherever it was.
I imagine there were lots of [debts] in that ledger that was never
collected. Most of the patients would pay something, though. Maybe they’d just have fifty cents to pay him, and he’d mark it down and give them credit. When he delivered a child, it was two dollars and a half or three dollars. He always carried medicine with him, and the medicine charge would be fifty cents.
The ones that couldn’t pay cash bartered. One old guy made a bunch of those split rails—I believe it was a hundred—for [credit of] seven dollars and a half. In [the ledger] you’ll see where people cradled wheat for fifty cents a day. They’d give him dried apples, a bushel of peaches, syrup, maybe a quarter of beef. Sometimes just a day’s work [would pay the bill], maybe hoeing his corn or working in his garden. He was quite a watermelon raiser. Mama said he would always plant his watermelon seed down on the creek bottoms on the seventh of May whether it was Sunday or not.
Actually, I still barter some myself, but the Internal Revenue frowns on it. But I do some work for the dentist and I do some work for the eye man and we swap out a lot.
Following is a list recorded in Dr. Brabson’s ledger of items that he accepted from patients as payment for his services:
| Payment to Dr. Brabson for services | amount |
| 2 pigs | [$]5.50 |
| 1 day rock hauling | 2.00 |
| gallon kerosene | .25 |
| 36 lbs. beef | 2.22 |
| mowing | 7.50 |
| 10 bushel turnips | 2.25 |
| 1 stack fodder | 2.00 |
| buffalo horns | 3.00 |
| ½ bushel dried grapes | .75 |
| pasturing | 8.00 |
| plowing 5 acres | 4.00 |
| pulling corn | .50 |
| work in meadow | 4.50 |
| patching roof | .50 |
| churning | 1.00 |
| photographs | 2.50 |
| dehorning cattle | .50 |
| ranging cattle | 4.50 |
| 1 lb. tobacco | .20 |
| beef skin | 2.00 |
I
LLUSTRATION 36
A sheet from Dr. Brabson’s ledger.
| Payment to Dr. Brabson for services | amount |
| chimney work | [$]2.50 |
| 1 blanket | 2.50 |
| fly brush | .75 |
| saw | 1.85 |
| 3 pecks onions | .37 ½ |
| 3 days foddering | 1.50 |
| 160 feet lumber | 1.60 |
| 1 gallon syrup | .40 |
| cutting wood | .50 |
| cotton | .25 |
| fruit jars | .90 |
| 4 days harvesting | 6.00 |
| sack of salt | 1.00 |
| hauling 274 lb. wire | 1.37 |
| 25 lb. flour | .75 |
| 2 days planting | 2.00 |
| quilting | 2.00 |
| 1 sheep | 1.65 |
| ½ lb. yarn | .30 |
| soup recipe | 1.50 |
| 12 socks | .30 |
| soap | .25 |
| 1 bushel dried apples | .50 |
| ¾ days cradling | .75 |
| 1 ½ bushel peaches | .75 |
| 350 rails | 7.00 |
| 2 days hauling | 3.00 |
| haying | 2.25 |
| 2 bushel potatoes | 1.25 |
| 2 days sawing wood | 1.50 |
| eggs | .60 |
| coffee | 1.00 |
| splitting wood | .30 |
| 25 lb. sugar | 1.25 |
| 7 ½ bushels wheat | 7.50 |
| blackberries | .50 |
| chair | .50 |
| 12 ½ lbs. pork | 1.00 |
| lumber | 1.75 |
| 180 ft. culls | 1.25 |
| shotgun | 7.00 |
| spinning | .50 |
| 12 lbs. honey | 1.50 |
| 1 day wagon and team | 1.25 |
| 8 gal. ware | [$] .75 |
| knives and forks | 1.25 |
| pair of cards | .37 |
| 1300 shingles | 2.60 |
| 1 bushel oats | .40 |
| 7 brooms | .70 |
| shoeing 2 horses | .80 |
| 24 lbs. bacon | 2.40 |
| 1 barrel | .50 |
| lard | 1.20 |
| 1 pair shoes | 1.25 |
| drill 1 days work | .50 |
| making gate | 1.00 |
| 32 stakes | 2.06 |
| 1 peck chestnuts | .25 |
*
Milk sickness was a common and greatly feared disease not only in the Appalachians, but also in the Midwest. Doctors that were able to treat it were widely respected and greatly valued members of any community. Dr. Neville, for example, in our community, was often described to us on interviews as “the only doctor around here that could cure the milk sick.”
Gerald W. Sanders, the lead technician at the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial in Lincoln City, Indiana, was kind enough to send us several materials regarding the disease. One was a booklet entitled “Milk Sickness Caused by White Snakeroot” written by Edwin Lincoln Moseley (professor emeritus of biology for the State University at Bowling Green, Ohio) and published in 1941 jointly by the Ohio Academy of Science in Bowling Green and the author. Another was a handout for visitors to the Memorial entitled. “The Plant That Killed Abraham Lincoln’s Mother: White Snakeroot.” (No author given.) The latter reads, in part, “By definition, milk sickness is poisoning by milk from cows that have eaten white snakeroot. Many early settlers in the Midwest came into contact with the sickness.
“In the Fall of 1818. Nancy Lincoln died as milk sickness struck the Little Pigeon Creek settlement. The sickness has been called pucking
/sic/
fever, sick stomach, the slows and the trembles. The illness was most common in dry years when cows wandered from poor pasture to the woods in search of food. In man, the symptoms are loss of appetite, listlessness, weakness, vague pains, muscle stiffness, vomiting, abdominal discomfort, severe constipation, bad breath, and finally coma. Recovery is slow and may never be complete. But more often an attack is fatal. And so it was for Nancy Hanks Lincoln. She died on October 5, 1818.”