Old Time Remedies

Acne
⦁ Wash your face with a wet diaper.
⦁ Mix 3 teaspoons of honey into 8 ounces of apple cider. Rub on face several times daily.
Anemia
⦁ Eat raw liver and drink fresh blood.
Ant Bites
⦁ Take a dip of snuff and rub the fresh dipped snuff on the bite.
Appendicitis
⦁ Tie a leather thong around your waist and the appendicitis will enter the thong. Take the thong and tie it around a tree and the sickness will enter the tree.  
Arthritis
⦁ Dissolve 3/4 teaspoon powder pectin (or 1-tablespoon liquid pectin) in a glass of purple grape juice. Drink once a day. This is from an Amish doctor and about 60% of the people who try it say it really works. The liquid dissolves better than the powder.
⦁ Take a dead cat into the woods to a hollow stump that has spunk in it. Twirl the cat overhead and then toss the cat to the south. Walk away north but do not look back.
⦁ Carry a potato in your pocket. It will not rot, but harden as it absorbs the arthritis.
⦁ Tie a strip of cloth soaked in turpentine around the limb.
Asthma
⦁ If a child has asthma stand him up against a tree and drive a nail in the tree an inch above his head. If the child grows an inch in the next year, the asthma will disappear.
⦁ Eat lots of carrots.
⦁ Mix 1 tablespoon of salt in 1/2 cup strong cider vinegar. Swallone one half spoonful every ten seconds until gone.
⦁ Wear a muskrat skin on the chest with the fur next to the chest.
Baldness/Thinning Hair
⦁ Smear your head with fresh cow manure.
⦁ For thinning hair make a solution of salt and water and comb through hair every day until you see hair becoming thicker.
⦁ To prevent thinning and baldness, never cut the hair in the light of the moon.
Beard Growing
⦁ The Liquid obtained from boiling old boots was used to promote the growth of hair on the face of young men—an attempt to appear more masculine. 
Bee Stings
⦁ Mix up honey and dirt dauber’s nest and rub it on the sting.
Boils
⦁ Catch a chaparral bird (roadrunner) in the early morning. Kill and eat it and the boil will go away.
⦁ Soak a small section of heel of homemade white bread in boiling water. Squeeze with back of spoon. Lay on sterile gauze or boiled cloth. Add pinch baking soda (1/4 tsp). Mix with soaked bread, wrap in gauze and apply to affected area. 
⦁ Applying meat fat, raw potatoes, war sauerkraut or yellow lye soap to the boil will bring it to a head.
Burns
⦁ Apply ice wrapped in damp washcloth until pain stops. No scaring will occur. 
⦁ Go to the lot and make a calf get up and defecate. Put the feces in a flour sack and cover the burn with it. Leave it on until the next morning.
⦁ Apply strong tea to the burned area.
⦁ Cancer – Preventing
⦁ Eat three almonds a day and you will not die from cancer.
Chills
⦁ Take a new broom and sweep across his/chills back in the sign of a cross.
Colds – Curing
⦁ Catching leaves in your hand, which fall from the trees in the fall, will cure a head cold.
Colds – Preventing
⦁ Eat an onion sandwich and wash your hair.
Colic
⦁ Close the windows and doors of the baby’s room and have the father keep smoking a pipe or cigar.
Coughs
⦁ Put some cow dung in water and bring it to a boil. Gargle the water three times a day and your cough will be gone.
⦁ Bake onions and pour all the juice from the baked onions into a glass and drink.
Crick in the Neck
⦁ Go down to the hog pen and find where a hog has rubbed his neck against the fence, then rub your neck in the same spot.
Croup
⦁ Pack sheep droppings into a tobacco sack and soak in warm water. Apply the sack to your neck and wear it until the choking spell is over.
Cuts
⦁ Pack the cut in axle grease.
⦁ Take a large army ant and apply him to the cut, so that he takes hold of each side of the wound with his pincers. Cut his head off from his body, leaving his head to hold the cut together.
⦁ Apply spider’s web to a bleeding cut.
Note: These are just for fun! While these were actually published in old books, we do not recommend that you try them! They actually could be dangerous!
Dandruff
⦁ To one quart of water, add one ounce of sulphur. Shake very well very two hours and saturate the head every morning with the liquid. Dandruff will disappear, leaving hair bright and glossy.
Diarrhea
⦁ Eat several coconut cookies (some say this really works.) 
Earache
⦁ Have someone blow tobacco smoke into the ear five times while saying, “Hurt, hurt, go away; go into a bale of hay.”
Fever
⦁ Gather a supply of rabbit dung and make a strong tea of the dung in hot water. Strain and drink the tea every half hour until the sweating stops.
Flu
⦁ To cure the flu, put sulphur in your shoes.
Foot Gone to Sleep
⦁ Wet your finger with spit and put the sign of the cross on the sole of your foot.
Freckles
⦁ To get rid of freckles, get up at five-thirty on Sunday morning and go outside. If there is a lot of dew get your hands real wet in the grass. Rub the dew on your face and turn around nine times, saying, “Dew, dew, do, do, take my freckles; wear ‘em on you; dew, dew, thank you.” Say this nine times while turning around. Do not wash the dew off and do not wash your face until the next day.
⦁ To remove freckles or skin spots — take a small flatfish fresh from the sea and hold it firmly against the skin until the fish dies. This will also cure the whooping cough 
Headache
⦁ Sleep with a pair of scissors under your pillow. The next morning the headache will be gone.
Hiccups
⦁ Hold your arms above your head and pant like a dog.
⦁ Take a drink of water while standing on your head.
⦁ Stick your head under water and count to twenty-five.
⦁ Put your head between your legs and look at the sun 
Ingrown Toenail
⦁ Tie a lizard’s liver to a leather string. Take the leather string and tie it around your left ankle. The ingrown toenail will disappear in nine days.
Lice
⦁ First, put your clothes on an anthill. Then wash your head in kerosene. Spring your head with sea salt and then, parting the hair, pour raw whisky on your scalp. Let it stay for 48 hours. Do not smoke or go near the fire.  
Liver Trouble
⦁ Take one-half of a white turnip and one-half of a purple turnip and tie together with a white string. Urinate on it. Hang this on the bedpost of the bed on the first night, then on the foot post the second night until you circle the bed.
Measles
⦁ Put burned cornmeal in a tobacco bag and hang it around the neck.
Mumps
⦁ Tie a black sock around your neck. To keep mumps from going down on a boy, tie a red cloth around his waist.
Nosebleed
⦁ Every night pour a bucket of cold water over your head. Keep this up for fourteen days and you will be cured.
⦁ Take a piece of string and make nine knots in it 
Pain
⦁ Find a rock that is partly covered with dirt. Remove the rock from its resting place and spit on the bottom or covered side. Replace the rock in the same hole exactly as you found it.
Perspiration
⦁ People who perspire a lot should use a teaspoonful of ammonia in bathwater. Alum, borax or ammonia added to bathwater is also effective.
Poison Ivy (oak, sumac, etc)
⦁ Make a paste from fels naptha soap and apply. Do not cover. Let it dry and flake off by itself. One application usually does the job. This from the 1930’s. 
Poor Eyesight
⦁ Pierced ears help cure poor eyesight 
⦁ The first snow to fall in May is good for sore eyes 
Pneumonia
⦁ Tansey is a yellow flower that blooms on a leafy stem about two feet tall. It usually grew wild in the local gardens. The stem, flowers and all were gathered, deposited in some kind of bag, and hung up to dry. Then when needed they were crushed and made into hop poultices for application to the chest and/or back of a person suffering from pneumonia 
Rabies
⦁ Sear the bite with a hot iron to keep from going crazy.
Rash
⦁ Apply the juice of the Aloe Vera leaf to the rash. If it is a bull nettle rash, all you have to do is urinate on it.
Ringworm
⦁ Find a black-headed girl between the ages of twelve and sixteen and have her remove her right shoe. Now rub her big toe well over the ringworm for about one minute. Within a week the ringworm will have disappeared.
⦁ Take the best Cuba cigars; smoke one a sufficient length of time to accumulate about an inch of ash upon the end of the cigar. Wet the whole surface of the ringworm with saliva then rub the ashes from the cigar thoroughly into and over the sore.
⦁ Circling ringworm with one’s wedding ring and crossing it three times will surely cure it. 
Sore Eyes
⦁ Catch some bedbugs and crush them. Mix with salt and human milk. Rub this mixture on the eyes night and morning.
Sore Throat
⦁ Take a black thread, tie nine knots in it, and wear it around your neck for nine days.
⦁ Heat coarse salt in a cast iron frying pan; fill hand knit wool stocking with heated salt. Sew top of stocking together. Hold around the neck with large safety pin. 
⦁ Tie a piece of fatback on a string and swallow the fatback, pulling it up again by the string. Repeat several times. 
⦁ To prevent catching strep throat, burn orange peels on the damper and inhale while they are burning. 
⦁ Mix turpentine from a fir tree with sugar and swallow it.
⦁ Eat molasses candy made with a small amount of kerosene oil. Some people just boiled molasses and kerosene oil (or Minard’s Liniment) and took a couple of spoonfuls every few hours. 
⦁ Rub kerosene oil and butter on the throat and chest. 
Sprains
⦁ Take a dirt dauber’s nest and make a mud out of it with vinegar. Daub it on the sprain and wrap a stocking around it.
Stomach Ache/Cramps
⦁ Cut some hair off from behind the right ear in the light of the moon. Then throw it over your right shoulder
⦁ .Lie across a barrel and roll until your hands touch the ground on one side, then push with your hands and roll back until your feet touch the ground on the other side. Repeat several times. 
⦁ A teaspoon of ground ginger in a glass of sweetened boiling water, sipped while very hot is a cure for stomach pain. 
Stuttering
⦁ Hit the person stuttering in the mouth with a chicken gizzard.
Warts (Warts were obviously a problem, because there are lots of these.)
⦁ Make a paste of baking soda and spirits of camphor and apply every night. Cover with a bandage. Remove in morning. Removes all kinds of warts, even stubborn planter’s warts that resist every “medical” treatment. This is from another Edgar Cayce reading.
⦁ Rub the wart with a rock. Put the rock in a tobacco sack and throw it over your left shoulder.
⦁ Rub the wart with a piece of bacon that has been stolen from a neighbor.
⦁ Catch a frog and rub him on the wart
⦁ Walk out into the road after dark when you can see the moon. Run around three times and spit over your right shoulder.
⦁ Take a tick from a dog and let the tick bit the wart. In two or three days the wart should be gone. Then put the tick back on the dog. 
⦁ Cut bark from a tree and rub it on the warts. Then tape the bark back on the tree. By the time it grows on again, the warts should have gone. 
⦁ Rub fatback on your warts and give it to a dog. If he eats the fat back, the warts will go away
⦁ Tie a horse hair around each wart and within a week all the warts will fall off 
⦁ Rub fatback over the warts and throw it over your left shoulder. Don’t look to see where it goes. If an animal eats the fatback, your warts will disappear. 
⦁ Apply chalk to warts; with same piece of chalk mark X over the oven door for each wart. As the chalk burns off, the warts will disappear. 
⦁ Bathe warts occasionally for a week or so in water in which potatoes have been boiled. 
⦁ When you go to church, make the sign of the cross over your warts three times. 
⦁ Light a match , let it burn a little, then blow it out, touch the burnt end to wart and get someone to hid the match 
⦁ Put butter on wart and have a cat lick it. 
⦁ Warts can be cured by touching each one with a piece of string and then tying knots in the string — one knot for each wart. The string is buried in the ground, and when the string rots the warts disappear. 
⦁ Another cure for warts is the bathe them in water found in a depression in a rock, at the same time saying “In the name of the Father, son, and Holy Ghost.” This only works if you come across such a rock accidentally — it’s no good if you go out looking for the rock. 
⦁ Apply snail to warts. 
Whooping Cough
⦁ Put some hair from the person on a piece of bread outside the kitchen door where the moon can shine on it. If a dog comes along and eats it, the cough will be cured in five days.
⦁ Grab hold of a table leg when coughing.
⦁ Place a pan of fresh chicken droppings under the bed.
Compiled and edited by Kathy Weiser/Legends of America, updated July, 2016

I am retired and enjoying life. My hobbies are my 5 grandchildren, son and daughter, and my loving husband. I am a photographer and extreme nature lover. I love spending time in my garden or in the wilderness connected to God my Creator.