By Betty Kirkpatrick
Herbal remedies and other complementary therapies continue to have the support of a great many people even in the face of the extraordinary progress being made by modern science-based medicine. Many of these traditional remedies are very old and have survived the march of time. However, some old remedies are no more.
There seem to have been a surprising number of old Scots suggested remedies for whooping cough, or pertussis to give it its Sunday name. Whooping cough is an infectious bacterial infection which involves paroxysmal coughing and a drawing-in of the breath which causes a whooping noise.
Whooping cough is relatively rare now, given that many children are now given a vaccine to prevent it. However, it was once considered serious and fatalities were not unknown. One of my children, now well grown-up, managed to contract the disease as a child despite having been vaccinated against it. If that was the attenuated version then I am not surprised that strenuous efforts were made to cure it. It is a most distressing illness.
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In former times a change of air was much recommended for the coughing child. Even a few miles down the road might make a difference. The smell of tar was thought to be particularly beneficial and, if there was road-mending in the vicinity of whooping cough sufferers, they were taken to inhale the smell of the tar. They would have had a field day in these days of wholesale pothole mending. Those lacking a handy source of tar might be held over a freshly dug hole in the ground and told to breathe in the rich smell of the earth. Hopefully, more imaginative children did not fear that they were about to be put in the hole. Some of the other proposed cures for whooping cough were decidedly weird. Both in Scotland and in parts of Ireland a white horse was central to one of the cures. The young whooping cough sufferer was carried around by someone until they encountered a man on a white horse. Fortunately for the child and carrier, horses and horsemen were a much more common sight on the average highway than they are today. Statistically, I am not sure how common white horses were in comparison with other colours – but apparently, in cases of extremity, a piebald horse would do. It was not the mere sight of the horse and rider that was thought to effect the cure. The plot gets even stranger. The man with the white horse was asked by the person carrying the sick child to recommend a good cure for whooping cough. I would think that this would faze quite a few people. Presumably the "don’t knows" were quite high in number unless people were much more inventive than they are today. If a cure was suggested, it was carried out to the letter. The origin of this strange suggested remedy is unknown. One proposal is that the early forerunners of doctors might have commonly ridden white horses, but that is speculation. The horse was not the only beast of burden to be used in a suggested cure for whooping cough. The donkey was also used for this purpose. The child suffering from whooping cough was passed under a donkey in the hope of improving the condition. Again the origin of this supposed remedy is unknown. There has been some speculation that the donkey was credited with these healing powers because of the animal’s connection with Christ. Another old Scots remedy for whooping cough involved a woman whose maiden surname and married surname were the same. Such a person was asked to give bread and milk to the whooping cough sufferer. In an area where a particular surname was exceptionally prevalent, finding such a woman was probably not such a tall order as it sounds. In parts of Ireland there was a suggested whooping cough cure which bore a great similarity to the Scots one. Again it involved a woman who had not changed her surname when she married and took her husband’s name. She and her husband were asked to send the first and last bits of their breakfast to the whooping cough sufferer via a messenger. Then there were the suggested remedies known as transference cures. These involved certain forms of wildlife. They led to the death of the creatures involved, but no one much cared about animal rights in those days. In one of the cures a live spider was put in a bag which was then tied round the patient’s neck. The hope was that the infection would pass from the patient to the spider in the bag. If the cure was successful, the hapless spider would die and the lucky patient would be rendered coughless. It is not known what happened to whooping cough sufferers who also suffered from arachnophobia. Another transference cure for whooping cough had the patient coughing into a live fish or frog. When the coughing session was complete the creature was then released back into its watery habitat in the hope that it would catch the infection and die, leaving the original sufferer infection-free. Hopefully, no one child was subjected to all of these supposed cures. Even having to undergo one of them probably made sufferers wish that they were allowed to stay in bed and cough and whoop in peace.Donate to us: support independent, intelligent, in-depth Scottish journalism from just 3p a day
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