General Chat

Many were handed down through the generations, along with advice on suitable clothing to keep chills at bay - red flannel, liberty bodices with rubber buttons that melted in the dolly tub, and silk scarves or woollen socks for a sore throat or earache.. Some remedies were actually made at home - tonic from beetroot and stout given to aid recovery from illness or pregnancy; hot water and pepper for an upset stomach; vinegar on blotting or brown paper for a headache or poultices made from bread or mustard. Other were available in the oddest places - being taken to the nearest 'cocky watchman's' hut to be held over his hot tar bucket, to breath in the fumes as a cure for bad coughs. Often children would be sent to the chemists to buy an astonishing mixture, involving such arcane ingredients as 'syrup of squills', 'paregoric' or 'ipequana' - more locally known as 'ipec wine'.

Fennings Little Healers No Nit Oil Electropathic Belts Beethams Capillary Hair Fluid Whelpens Pills Yeomans Ointment and Pills Dr. Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound for Women's Complaints (as immortalised by the Scaffold's 'Lily the Pink') Oldridges Balm of Columbia Lamploughs Pyretic Saline

Too Fat - Dr. Gordon's Elegant Pills Page Woodcock Wind Pills Carbolic Smoke Ball Clarkes Blood Mixture Dr.Williams Pink Pills Nortons Camomile Pills Dr. Brookes Solar Elixir Neaves Health Diet ZamBuk Suphur powder for a sore throat

Sulphur and treacle - to cleanse the blood Soap and suger to draw a boil, a splinter or clear infection. Bread poultice for quinsy. Cinder tea for babies' wind (a piece of red hot cinder was dropped into water, seived, and given to the baby). Gentian violet for sores, warts or scabies

Green Fairy the Ipec Wine brings back memories my Gran Married in Canada and got the recipe there 80 yrs ago it was the family cough Mix every winter. Wintergreen Ointment Sloans Liniment Bile Beans Thermogene Wool. Golden stye Ointment Boracic Crystals Peppermint Oil. June x.

Gargling with salt water for sore throat, and all though not a remedy, a mixture of soot and salt to clean teeth

thats strange you can still get ipecec mixture for coughs in chemist today however now it has morphine with it, ipecechuana and morphine

re gargling with salt water. That makes sense. When OH recently had a tooth out the dentist advised him to rinse his mouth with salt water. Ann Glos

I can remember my Dad mentioning Juniper as a pain killer for bad backs and when hubby had pnuemonia as a baby they put a bread poltice on him..... well it obviously worked. Lynda x