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Rambiling & Ruminating
Anyone old enough to remember when you had to pay a Poll Tax to vote, probably also remembers what it was like to get sick as a child. We used to get sick from things that kids today have never heard of, much less experienced. Having to pay $3 for an office call, and $5 if the doctor came to your house might have been the good part of the old days, but the reason for the visit, usually wasn't. Two things that come to mind are dull needles that had already been used a dozen times and foul-tasting medicines. One of the worst things that I ever had was the German measles. Treatment required being confined to bed in a darkened room. I'm not sure why, but it probably had something to do with the possibility that you could go blind. This was especially hard for me because my mother usually bought me a few comic books when I was sick, and I couldn't see to read them. There was no TV back then, and the children's radio programs didn't come on until late in the afternoon. Carbuncles, boils, risens and styes were common, but painful, skin diseases. These sometimes became so enlarged that they had to be lanced to relieve the pressure and drain the infection. Whenever I had one of these the doctor always prescribed sulphur tablets. These foul-tasting yellow tablets were about the size of a quarter, and had to be chewed up. Some of my friends had to take a spoonful of cod liver oil everyday. I don't recall what it was supposed to prevent. I tasted some once and remember thinking that I didn't ever want to get whatever that stuff was supposed to cure. And while we are on the subject of oil, let's say a few words about that old favorite, castor oil. It seems that castor oil was prescribed for almost every kind of stomach ailment. Everyone should try it just once, if for no other reason than to have something to tell your grandkids about. The only way that I could keep it down was to mix it with Coca-Cola and swallow fast. The results of keeping it down weren't any more pleasant than throwing it up. There was one thing worse than castor oil, though. Croton oil! I never took any of that, but it had the reputation of making a nonstop journey once it was swallowed. Most kids had a wart on their hand or fingers at sometime or other. Contrary to what we were told, they are not caused by handling toad frogs. These things weren't painful, but they were unsightly. I had a cousin in New Orleans who could cure warts. She would lightly rub the wart while mumbling some kind of magic words and in about two weeks the wart would be gone. Maybe she had the Mojo touch. I was prone to earaches when I was little. My grandmother Davis in North Carolina had an unusual, but effective way of easing the pain. With my head in her lap, she placed drops of some kind of oil in my ear then blew her warm breath into it through a piece of wool cloth. One of the most painful things I ever had to endure was an infection in one of my fingers. They called it a bone felon. Every beat of my heart caused a stabbing pain in that finger. The doctor finally had to lance it to relieve the pressure. It was thought that a sliver of bone working its way out caused the problem, but I don't know if that was true or not. Does anyone ever have a bone felon anymore? I haven't heard of it in years. One thing that almost made me swear off drinking water out of creeks and mud holes was having to go get a typhoid shot every summer. They hurt and made your arm sore for a couple of days and we weren't allowed to go swimming for a while. A sure sign that it was shot time was when the grownups volun- teered to take us swimming then stopped off for an ice cream cone. We knew that the next stop was an appointment with the dreaded needle. Another memorable experience was to have a cavity filled using the old slow speed drills without the benefit of Novocain. Novocain was only used for things like root canals and extractions. I had my first shot of Novocain from an army dentist. When he brought out the needle I asked him what he was going to do. He said that he was going to deaden my tooth and fill my cavity and asked me if I had ever had Novocain. I said, "Are you kidding?" I couldn't wait to tell Dr. Lamar McLeod about this. When I was in grade school we had a little girl who wore a string around her neck with a dime on it. She said it was to prevent nosebleeds. In the winter she also wore a little cloth sack around her neck that contained a little piece of asafetida. It smelled really bad and was supposed to keep her from catching colds. It must have worked too, because I never knew her to have a cold. Of course, it could be that no one ever got close enough to sneeze on her. That stuff was really bad in a warm room. By the way, asafetida is available over the Internet. It is described as "a gum resin with an obnoxious odor like rotten garlic and is used to ward off colds, fevers and bad spirits." Catching a cold might not be so bad after all. And finally, the granddaddy of all bad experiences. When I was about 4 or 5 years old, my cousin and I had two puppies that playfully bit us and several other children in the neighborhood. One of the dogs died and the other got sick with rabies. We had to immediately start a long series of extremely painful shots that were given in the stomach. Most of the kids got 16 shots, but I had to get 21 because I had been bitten in the face. Every morning we were marched next door to the old South Alabama Infirmary on West Cedar Street for the shots. Gray Milstead was one of the unlucky victims and I'll bet he still thinks about it sometimes when he looks across the street at the old hospital. From that experience I developed a fear of needles that didn't entirely go away until I went into the army.
I suppose that when we talk about the good old days we need to remember that there are some parts of them that weren't so good after all.
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