Access to all articles, new health classes, discounts in our store, and more!
Time-Honored Remedies of the Early 1900s
Published in Let’s Live, 1958.
* * *
“Why conceal that which relieves distress?”…This was the motivating influence which led the family doctors of the early 1900s to share their experiences by writing the famous Family Doctor Books which graced almost every home of that era. While these good doctors may have known little about why their recommendations worked, the fact that many of their recipes had a basis in sound nutrition as we know it today, shows what keen observers of the human phenomenon these doctors were. We will mention a few of these old remedies and show their significance in the light of modern findings.
Fats and Soaps
Do you recall Mother rushing for the butter or lard when a burn was in sight? Today, we know these contain vitamin F which is an important factor in skin nutrition. Linseed oil was once officially prescribed for ointments in medical preparations, and later replaced with cottonseed oil, which was called “sweet oil.” This was discontinued because of lost effectiveness. Carron oil, valued as a remedy for burns, consisting originally of linseed oil and lime water, was also changed to cottonseed oil. Following this replacement, so many protests of lost effectiveness were registered against the changes that the pharmacopoeial authorities restored the use of linseed oil.
Water Remedies
Barley water is a time-honored remedy for teething children. It owes its effectiveness, no doubt, to its calcium diffusing qualities, just as the once highly publicized rice diet for high blood pressure may have owed its effectiveness to the same factors. Oatmeal water, drunk in the fields by sun-drenched farmers, has long been used as an effective method of preventing sunstroke. Why? We now know that oatmeal is one of the richest sources of phosphatase, the important enzyme which promotes utilization of calcium and other nutrients. Steeping flaxseed in water was another old-time remedy used as an alternative for the intestinal tract, its meal being effective in constipation, and valued for its emollient effect. The widespread use of flaxseed poultices and flaxseed oil may have pointed the research which led to the discovery of vitamin F.
Gastric Hyperacidity
The older books on materia medica highly recommended metaphosphoric acid as a remedy for nervous indigestion. The more recent authorities have thrown out such recommendations with the statement that “hydrochloric acid should be preferred,” naively assuming that the indigestion was always due to a lack of this component of gastric juice. The phosphoric radical, on the other hand, is really the natural remedy to stop the excessive secretion of hydrochloric acid present in nervous indigestion and allied conditions. Today, we know that the germ of the wheat and the bran contain the phosphorus which is the very part removed in the refining process. What has the universal use of anti-acids and alkalizers to do with this except to create a lucrative business from its victims?
“Skittish” People-eaters
The old-time veterinarians also prescribed metaphosphoric acid for horses that were “skittish” and nervous from too much grass and oats (containing organic potassium in abundance, but lacking the phosphoric radical), wheat being the only cereal carrying it in substantial amounts. As we have said, the refining of wheat removes the phosphorus, producing a white, lifeless product which looks (and tastes) like the white lilies which we have come to know as the symbol of death. This analogy becomes something more than a play on words if we take into account a nation of jittery, tranquilizer-seekers, plagued by constipation, indigestion and on down the list to preventable heart disease, the number one travesty of them all.
Pop-Eye’s Remedy
Remember when Mother said, “Eat your spinach,” later discounted as a health super-food, and “Junior” was allowed to leave his spinach for the parakeet? We now learn that there is a factor in spinach which is 10 times as effective unit for unit, in clinical tests, as the vitamin A from fish liver oils, besides producing a more prolonged action. Let’s help Pop-Eye in reviving the spinach habit, but remember it may be “10 times as effective” if eaten raw. Try spinach in your raw salads, also raw potatoes, both good sources of raw food factors.
Baby Formula
Arrowroot was once widely used in baby formulas as a superior carbohydrate, experience having shown it agreed with babies better than any other starch or sugar. We now find the reason. It is the only starch product with a calcium ash. In this regard, the calcium chloride, in the form found in arrowroot starch, is very important for the maintenance of the proper acid and alkali balances in the human body.