Frontier Home Doctoring

Most families had their own home cures and remedies for common ailments.  Doctors were expensive and not close by, so in most cases it was the housewife's job to nurse.  Some of the common home remedies include:

Rheumatism: wahoo-root tea or polk root tea
Ague (malaria) - sulfur and molasses or quinine
Diphtheria - boiled sulfur or powdered brimstone in lime water then dripped into nostrils
Diarrhea - opium
Burns - sour milk and clay poultice
Poison Ivy - immerse in a mud hole

For childbirth, one of nature's most natural things, a doctor was called.  There were no antiseptics yet so "childbirth fever" which was actually infection, killed so many women.  For the most part, doctors seldom made it in time, so the actual birth was left for the father and a bit of luck. 

Advertising played a major part in influencing what remedies and "medicines" were used in the frontier home.  Farmers actually believed a healthy baby was a fat baby as the Groves Tasteless Chill Tonic stated: "Make Children and Adults Healthy and Fat as Pigs." Horse liniments were advertised as healthy for human and horse consumption in Pratts Healing Ointment - "Cures for Horse Harness and Saddle.  We can Use it Too!"

Medicine "Tonic" Peddlers on the frontier sold "remedies" directly to the home.  Comprised of 25% alcohol, they were consumed by tee-totaling pioneer women and given to infants as well.  If nothing else, they probably calmed the colic crying and helped calm mother as well.  In the late 1800s the Indians turned peddling tonics into a $80 million a year business.  The traveling medicine shows shared Native American herbal lore with entertainment and sold their largely useless "patent medicines" which for the most part were not even patented.

Next time...The Plains Doctor's Life
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Today in Pioneer History:  "On October 4, 1861, Frederic Remington, one of the preeminent artists of the American West, is born.