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.

Women's Diaries on the Trail...Diseases and Illnesses

Women wrote as ritual caretakers in their overland journals.  The real enemies to them were not Indians, but disease and accidents.  The heaviest westward migration was during the cholera epidemic.  Can you imagine a worst place to fall ill than an open and unmarked trail, left by the side of the road to either recover or die alone because you were a deterrent to the progress of the wagon train? No Antibiotics, no pain killers, no surgeries, no hospitals, no midwives...life was raw and untempered.

Women wrote of typhoid, mountain fever, measles, dysentery and drownings.  They knew that these killed more than Indians did.  Their job was to care for the dying and noted well the cost in human life.  The deaths were personal to these frontier women and they noted particulars of each grave site, age of person, new or old grave, disturbed...etc.  They prayed and tended over each one.  When a child's parents died, they took the children left into their own families. 

I would think that any woman who made it through the arduous journey would see it as a vicotry of her own life-stage.  Her test was whether or not she had held her family together against all odds.  Their pride was in keeping the integrity of the family life together in the names given to the children born on the overland journey: Gertrude Columbia, born on the shores of the raging Columbia River, Alice Nevada, born in the rocky Sierra Nevadas, and Gila Parrish, born along the Gila River in Arizona.  Two of the three survived - excellent odds in that unforgiving  wilderness.

The "New Country" was bittersweet - promises that took a toll on hope and optimism.  Through the eyes of the women we can better see history as the stuff of daily struggles.  Someday generations may look back on our blogs as records of history as well...


Next time:  Specifics Diaries of 1841-1850
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Today in Pioneer History:  On June 2, 1823, Arikara Indians attack William Ashley and his band of fur traders, igniting the most important of the early 19th century battles between Indians and mountain men.

Frontier Fridays: Home Medicine Cabinet

Suggestions for a Home Medicine Chest

Every housewife should have a well-stocked medicine chest which includes the following: Antimonial Wine, blister compound, blue pill, calomel, carbonate of potash, compound iron pills, compound extract of colocynth, compound tincture of camphor, opium powdered, Espom salts, jalapin powder, linseed oil, oil of turpentine, laudanum, sal ammoniac, senna leaves, soap liniment, sweet spirits of water, sweet spirits of niter, emetics, lotions, etc.

Also a set of apothecary sales with weights, measuring glasses in ounces and drams, motor and pestle, scissors, lancet, a probe, a pair of forceps, and some curved needles with which to attach wounds.

Such was life before the neighborhood pharmacy!  Aren't we lucky?

Frontier Fridays: How to Make a Mustard Plaster

How to Make a Mustard Plaster

How many people are there who really know how to make a mustard plaster? No one is a hundred at most, perhaps, and yet mustard plasters are used in every family, and physicians prescribe their application, never telling anybody how to make them, for the simple reason that doctors themselves do not know as a rule. The ordinary way is to mix the mustard with water, tempering it with a little flour, but such a plaster as this makes it simply abominable. Before it has half done it work, it begins to blister the patient, and leaves him finally with a painful flayed spot after having produced far less effect in a beneficial way than was intended. Now a mustard plaster should never make a blister at all. If a blister is wanted, there are other plasters far better than mustard for the purpose.
When you make a mustard plaster, then, use no water whatever, but mix the mustard with the white of an egg, and the result will be a plaster which will "draw" perfectly, but will not produce a blister even upon the skin of an infant, no matter how long it is allowed to remain on the part.