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Monday, December 6, 2010

frightening medicine

I'm fightin a cold. I hate colds. I'd rather have the flu. Not hangin in this perpetual state of functioning but miserable. At least when you have the flu, you are sick. Sick enough to justify layin' in bed all day utterly miserable. With a cold you have to push through.

But while makin my lemon tea with honey for my throat I was thinkin of some of the old timer remedies. Whenever I read some of them I wonder if more people died from the remedies rather than the illness.

Who thought that putting dried horse droppings in ale would cure anything? I don't drink but I have tasted alcohol. It tastes bad enough without adding horse fertilizer to it! Although after some of those drunken episodes I'm sure there's more than one wife who would add an extra dose of fertilizer to their hubby's morning ale.

What about dragon liver or pickled dragon liver? We all know there's no such thing as dragons. So where'd they get these rather rancid pieces of "magical" meat? On second thought I really don't want to know.

But the whole thing is who decided these specific ingredients "cured" anything? Healers borrowed their surgical equipment from the cook or the horse farrier. So I'm sharing dental extraction tools with a horses hooves. Yummy. Maybe that's where the droppings came into use?

Then there's the odd animal sacrafice usually a white or black. So why those two colors? Can't we all just get along. Or insects. Everything from lice, leaches, to cockroaches to spider webs. Supposedly if you stick a cockroach cut in two in your ear it'll fix an earache. I'd rather be deaf.

Ya know I think I'll just stick to my bee spit up. It at least tastes sweet.

1 comment:

All my city slickers tell me what ya think.