Radical treatments...

...maybe you never heard about the wartime stories from your grandparents(or even before that) how the people got parasites, just like we hear it nowadays from third world countries.





There wasn´t always clean water, or food..people got infected and sometimes it was lifethreatening.

100 years ago depending on where you were or your social standing, you couldn´t go to a doctor and get a remedy and quacks went around, selling coloured whiskey as a cure-all.



There are a couple of stories that stick out..



Orphans were sent to farms, adopted more or less, often just as cheap workers.

During the irish famine many irish children went to america, with or without their parents and ended up as orphans and slaveworkers.





Some were lucky and ended up on farms where they had still work to do, but were more or less family, accepted.



One such radical medicinal treatment was told by my gran, who in turn got it from her cousin in america..and the cousin was told that by her gran..or mother? I am not sure...



But it boils down to a female member of the family, around 15 years of age went to work on a farm.



The 'mother' there was a fierce woman that gave the devil a run for his money, if she blew up you were in for an earfull, but she also was a kind woman when there was the need for it, no matter to whom. She would pamper the gruffest cowboy and the unruliest child.



And she had some rules that were not really understood, but followed.



Everyone, from grown farm worker(including cowboys) to child, had to eat a teaspoon full of her garlic remedy.

A horrible oily paste of mostly garlic and some green herbs that had started to ferment in the oil.



They  took their daily spoon of medicine before the morning meal.



Just that there was a new runt from the orphanage who did take it, but spit it out when he went out of the room.



The summer was bad, the well turned muddy and the water was filtered through cloth to make it useable..I am not sure but I guess they used horse hair or sheep woll as filter material in the cloth.

There was enough water to keep the fields green, but the river was also muddy and the ground trampeled by the animals that went there for water.



At the end of the summer the runt went ill, getting weaker and pale. The doctor wasn´t really a help and just could tell that the boy might die sooner or later as he also developed the runs...cholera, a wasting disease, he couldn´t say for sure. Just that there most likely was no help.



What followed was deemed gruesome  by some.

It seemed the 'Misses' had found some pale, whit wriggly things in the bed of the boy and he was in for a treat.

If he liked it or not, the girl was sent out in the kitchen and it was time to mash garlic, onions and some herbs from the garden, tuning everything with mortar and pestil into a paste.

Cream was added and  force feed to the boy, shoved into the back of the throat so he had to swallow. It surely was bad and the boy got some more thinned out cream to get the burning out of his mouth and sooth his stomach so it would stay down.


..but the worst followed suit ..the same mixture was thinned out and applied with an enema bag in the morning and kept there.



Oh it had to burn like hell and they had to get in one of the farm workers to hold the boy down.
In the end it seemed it was just too uncomfortable to move, so all struggles were ceased.

What followed  after half an hour when the boy was released and the nightpot used, the garlic mixture flushing from the stomach also, was a big pile of worms..more like a clump of dying white parasites.


So now you might ask what has happened to the boy?

Through the dirty river water in which the kid bathed to cool off, he might have ingested worm larvaes, maybe also from the raw milk or by sneaking some of the raw belly fat of the slaughtered pigs that wasn´t yet cooked to get the lard from it. Woms are also spread through the milk, which is why nursing cats and dogs are dewormed.

Many kids,especially during war time did die because of the worms which would steal part of the nutrients but also weakening the immune system and leeching blood....as if the situation wasn´t bad enough already.

This crude treatment saved the boys life, the herbs killing the worms and inducing  greater movement in the intestines so the whole content was flushed out..which in itself was surely horrible, cramping, burning...similiar to how gall bladder stones may feel  when getting out.

Because, if the worms had just stayed in a big pile in the intestines, this could have clogged everything up, which would have been a death sentence at the time because no doctor could have operated him  to get the blockage away.

In germany during WW2 that did happen, my gran seeing the neighbours kid die because of a blockage induced by a pile of worms, how the kid got weaker every day and than died with a distended belly, part of the gut had died because of the blockage..not a nice way to go.



One thing was sure, the little runt from the orphanage didn´t refuse the daily medicine after that.
After a day of exhausted sleep and a week of bed rest he was as good as new, pale and still a bit weak, but that solved itself over time now that no parasites leeched the nutrients from his body.

I won´t go into further detail because I guess you can imagine how the cure was applied and so on.

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I don´t know which herbs were in that mix, but I am sure the daily medicine was made with different herbs or at least less ammounts of them. If there was wormfern in them, that would have been toxic for daily usage.

Unfortunally I have no chance of getting the original recipe, the resolut 'Misses'  did not give it away, but as far as I can imagine many households and farms would have similiar recipes, given from the mothers to daughters.


Many recipes may have gotten lost during the World Wars, when people had to flee, built up their existence somewhere else and when modern medicine waltzed along.


Other methods to get rid of internal parasites was also eating used coffee grounds. I guess the coffein and natural components like acids and tannins had a poisoning effect on the parasites and the rough structure of the coffee grounds 'scraped' them out of the gut.

Garlic, parsley as common kitchen herbs also had a poisoning effect on worms, but also raw, finely shaved carrots. The essential oil in the skin of raw carrots is toxic to many internal parasites and salvia, thyme, rosemary all contain essential oils that  parasites can not tolerate well.

I guess that 'cure' also could have killed the boy faster if it was applied too late or  the blockage didn´t get loose..or the body had been already too weakened by the parasites so it couldn´t tolerate the rough cure...but he already was as good as death...so there wasn´t much to loose.

And other cures given by the doctors of those times were rarely better, containing toxic herbs or heavy metalls...in the beginnings of modern medicine people were better of with the 'Misses' who still knew their natural remedies instead of the docs who were more like butchers or used the modern remedies that might be worse than the problem they sought to cure.

Like  mercury ointment against lice..especially common during WW1  ...I think  I rather take a shave and some garlic oil...