When award-winning author Donis Casey stops by for a visit, I know
she’ll bring with her interesting tidbits about the early 20th Century.
Today she comes with with home remedies for the flu.
Donis writes the Alafair Tucker Mysteries, set in Oklahoma during
the booming 1910s and featuring the sleuthing mother of ten children. The ninth
book has recently been released. The first book in the series, The Old Buzzard Had It Coming, is currently available as a
free download on iTunes. Learn more about Donis and her
books at her website.
Your Mother's Home Remedies for the Flu
When I was writing my
latest Alafair Tucker novel, The Return of the Raven Mocker, which is
set during the great influenza pandemic of 1918, I spent a great deal of
research time gathering old flu remedies, as well as early 20th Century recipes
for foods and drinks for the sick. At the time of the pandemic, there were
a lot of weird remedies in circulation in America, and more than a few people
died from being dosed with turpentine, coal oil, mercury, ox bile, chicken
blood, and other unmentionable home remedies they were given by their
well-meaning caretakers. Some of the deaths in the epidemic were probably
caused by aspirin poisoning rather than the disease. Aspirin was relatively new
on the market, and folks may have figured that if a little aspirin was good for
fever and aches, then eating whole handfuls every hour was even better if you
were really sick.
My mother used to give
us kids 7Up when we got sick, and I dearly wished I could have included that suggestion
in my book, but of course 7Up wasn’t available when Alafair’s kids were young,
so she had to make do with ginger tea. She could have given her patients ginger
ale, but knowing Alafair, she wouldn’t buy soda pop when she could make
something just as effective at home.
Ginger tea is
practically a cure for nausea. Boil a slice of fresh ginger in a cup of water
until the water turns golden and sip it hot. I like to sweeten mine with honey.
Our foremothers knew all about the medicinal qualities of food. In early 20th
Century America, every housewife had her arsenal of remedies for common
ailments, and many of them worked. In fact, some of what I learned has come in
handy over the past winter.
Garlic really does
have antibiotic properties and was used a lot as a treatment during the 1918
flu outbreak. I found a recipe for garlic soup in an early 20th Century
cookbook that was guaranteed to cure the flu. It called for 24 cloves of garlic
to be simmered for an hour in a quart of water. That will kill any germ that
dares to try to infect you.
Dry burned toast is
excellent for an upset stomach and diarrhea. Well-cooked, soft rice is easy to
digest, and if you simmer one part raw rice in seven parts liquid for forty
minutes to an hour, the rice ends up creamy and soft and practically
pre-digested.
Onion is antibiotic as
well. My great-grandmother swore that placing a bowl of raw onions in a sick
room would absorb the ill humors that were floating around. (She also liked to
put raw eggs in the corners to soak up bad juju.) Here is a story that was told
to me by the man to whom it happened: when he was a young boy, he
developed such a severe case of pneumonia that the doctor told his mother that
he was not going to survive. In an act of desperation, his mother sliced up a
raw onion and bound it to the bottoms of his feet with strips of sheet, then
put cotton socks on him. In the morning, his fever had broken, his lungs had
cleared, and the onion poultice had turned black. Is that what saved him? I
don’t know. But that didn’t keep me from using the idea in my novel.
In fact, I found a
number of remedies that called for binding something to the feet. An 1879
cookbook that I've owned for years recommends taking a large horseradish leaf,
placing it on a hot shovel to soften if, then folding it and fastening it to
the hollow of the foot with a cloth bandage. I also found foot-poultice recipes
that used burdock leaves, cabbage, and mullein leaves. All the above are
guaranteed to “alleviate pain and promote perspiration”.
Chicken soup really,
really does help. Your mother says so, and so does science.
The Return of the Raven Mocker
An Alafair Tucker
Mystery
Raven Mocker is a
Cherokee legend, an evil spirit who takes the form of a raven and takes wing at
night to possess the sick and elderly and torment them until they die.
When the Raven Mocker returns to Boynton, Oklahoma in the fall of 1918, he
brings with him the great influenza pandemic that claimed fifty million lives
all over the world. World War I is still raging in Europe, but Alafair Tucker
is fighting her own war as the epidemic sweeps through like wildfire. What a
perfect time for someone to commit murder. Who’s going to notice?
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