Home Remedies from Foxfire 1, Part 2

And here's the rest of the lineup of home remedies from Foxfire 1.

Insomnia
Make a tea of boneset leaves, using one tablespoonful. You may use them fresh or dried. (Catnip tea is good, too. HM)

Irritation Caused by Insects
Bee Stings
Chew or mash ragweed and put it on sting to deaden pain and reduce swelling.
Put moist snuff, mud, tobacco juice, or red clay on it.
Crush a few chrysanthemum leaves and rub the juice on the sting.

Chigger Bites
To relieve itching and infection, rub chewed snuff or tobacco over the bites.
Make a mixtgure of butter and salt to stop itching.

Spider Bites
If bitten by a black widow spider, drink liquour heavily from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. You won't get drunk, you'll be healed. (I'd advise caution with this one.)

Irritations of the Skin
Hives
Boil chestnut oak leaves and apply the resulting dark juice to the affected areas. Or take any of a variety of teas to break them out. These teas include catnip, ground ivy, mashed up berries of the tread-save, red alder leaves, raw alder bark scraped uphill.

Poison Ivy
Use a mixture of buttermilk or vinegar and salt.
Rub wild touch-me-not (jewelweed) on the area.
Slice open a green tomato and run the juice over the affected area.

Erysipelas (skin disease)
Use a poultice of peach tree leaves and corn meal.
Make a salve of balm of Gilead buds fried in mutton tallow. Add vaseline is you wish.

Itch
Use sulfur and lard.
Use gunpowder and sulfur.
Wash some yellowroot and put it on the affected area.

Inflammation
Bind salty fat meat to a stone bruise or a thorn in the foot to draw out the inflammation. A poultice of clay will do the same thing. (I've used clay for drawing out splinters. Good stuff!)
Make a tea of poke roots by boiling them in water for a couple of minutes. Dip a cloth in it and rub on the affected area. (Be careful not to get any in your mouth.)

Freckles
Buttermilk and lemon juice mixed together and put on freckles will remove them.
Put sap from a grapevine on them.

Chapped Hands
Rub pine resin on them.
Rub hands with mutton tallow.

Athlete's Foot
Wrap a wool string around the toe, or step in cow dung that is fresh.

Sweaty Feet
Boil dried chestnut leaves until you have an ooze. Apply this to the feet.

Kidney Trouble
Make a tea from dried trailing arbutus leaves.
Eat one or two poke berries a day for a couple of days.
Drink some red alder tea.

Liver Trouble
Make a tea of lion's tongue by boiling a few leaves in water, then straining. Add syrup if you want to sweeten it.

Measles
Any herb tea will break them out.
Make a tea of sheep dung to break them out.
Boil red alder branches and drink the tea.

Nosebleed
Take a small piece of lead and bore a hole in it. Put a string through the hole, tie it, and wear it around your neck. Your nose won't bleed again.
Place a nickel directly under the nose between the upper lip and the gum and press tightly.
Lie down and put a dime on your heart.

Pain Killer
Roast some poke roots by the fire. Scrape them clean with a knife and grind up. Make a poultice out of the powder and apply to the bottom of the feet. It will draw pain out of anywhere in the body. (Wonder if this one works...I might try it.)

Pneumonia
To bring down the fever, put some quinine and hog lard on a cloth and put it on your chest.
Give the person two teaspoonsful of oil rendered from a skunk.
Make an onion poultice to make the fever break. Then give the person whiskey and hot water.
Make a tea of butterfly weed and add a little whiskey and drink it.

Rheumatism
Roast a poke root in ashes in the same manner as you would roast potatoes. While it is still hot, apply it to the inflamed joint. This eases the pain and reduces the swelling.
Drink a mixture of pokeberry wine and whiskey.
Let rattleroot, ginseng, red corn root, wild cherry bark, and golden seal root sit in one gallon of white whiskey. Drink small portions of the resulting liquid as needed.
Rub some wildcat oil on the skin.
Cook garlic in your food to east the pain.

Risin's (I think this means boils.)
Place an elm bark poultice over the bump.
Scrape the white of an Irish potato and place on scrapings on the bump. Bind them on with a clean cloth. This will draw the risin to a head.
Take raw fat meat (the fattest you can get), cut a thin slice of it and bind it over the bump with a cloth bandage. This draws it to a head, and when you pull the cloth off, a tiny hole is left in the center of the bump. Make a thread loop and ease this loop into the hole and twist several times; then yank the core of the risin' out with a swift motion. (Gak!)
Eat sulfur mixed with honey.

Sores
Put butter around the sore so a dog will lick it. The dog's saliva will cure it.
Put a little lard or something equally greasy on the sore. Then dust the sore with sulfur. The grease will hold the sulfur on.
Make a salve of white pine resin and mutton tallow.
Mash up yellowroot and put it on the sore.

Sore Throat
Bake onions in an open fireplace; then tie them loosely around your throat.
Gargle with honey and vinegar.
Rub pine oil on your throat.
Take a sock you have worn inside a boot and worked in for almost a week so that it has a bad odor. Tie it around your neck.

Stomach Trouble
Make a tea of wild peppemint and drink it.
Deink some blackberry juice or wine.
Drink some juice from kraut left over after cooking.
Make a tea of golden seal roots and drink it.
To settle the stomach, place five small flint rocks in a glass of water. Let it sit for a few minutes and then drink.

Tonsil Trouble
Gargle with tan bark tea make from chestnut leaves.
Smear balm of Gilead slave over the person's chest.
Gargle with salt water.

Toothache
Make a small amount of wine from pokeberries, and mix one part of the wine with eight parts white whiskey. Take a small spoonful just a couple times a day. It's also good for rheumatism and muscle cramps.
Use burned alum.
Put drops of vanilla straight from the bottle on the tooth.

Warts
Get something like a penny that a person would want to pick up. Put some blood from the wart on it and trow it into the road. When someone pickes it up, the wart will go away.
Wet your finger and make a cross on the wart.
Tie a horsehair around it.
Rub the wart with the skin of a chicken gizzard, then hide the skin under a rock. The wart will disappear.
Wash the affected are with water from a rotten chestnut stump for nine mornings in a row before breakfast.

Worms
In the early spring, pick the small tender leaves of the poke plant. Boil the leaves, drain them, and cook in grease from fatback. Eat a mess of these.
Take "worm syrup" which is made by boiling Jerusalem oak and pine root together.
Eat tobacco seeds.
Eat a head of garlic every day until they are gone.
Put three or four drops of turpentine in a teaspoon of sugar and eat it.

Preventatives, Cure-alls
Take wild cherry tree bark, yellow poplar bark, and yellowroot boiled, strained and mixed with white liquor.
Mix together some sulfur and molasses and eat it.

Salves
Take about two tablespoons of mutton tallow, and heat it up in a frying pan with about six balm of Gilead buds. Mash the buds up while the mixture cools and when the grease is all out of the buds, strain the mixture. Put it in a jar and cover it. The salve is clear and will last for years.
Take one cup of pine resin, about one ounce of camphor-phenique, one cup of mutton tallow, and ten to fifteen balm of Gilead buds. Put it all in a frying pan and heat until liquid. Mash the buds until all the juice is out of them. Strain and put into jars and cover. Makes about a pint.

To help hair grow, break a section of a grape vine, set in a bottle and let the juice drain. Rub the juice in the hair.
A piece of nutmeg tied around the neck will prevent neuralgia.
Give a grouchy person a tea made from violet blossoms.

There you go! Live and learn.
HM