Kelley at Suburban Blight discusses annoying home remedies from long ago (you youngsters probably don’t even know of half this stuff- try to use these home remedies now and Jeb Bush and the DCF will take your kids away from you):
Have you ever experienced this barbarity? Having strep or tonsillitis is bad enough, but having your mother hold you down while she paints your throat with a long Q-Tip and a bottle of Mercurochrome – slapping you with every trigger of the gag-reflex (like you’re doing it on purpose!) – just sucks the big one. Not only does it sting like the proverbial mutha, it tastes like you’ve just drunk a bottle of that liquid metal they inject you with to provide contrast for an MRI.
I second her sentiments about the little vial of orange death known as Mercurochrome, and I add some others to the evil Hall of Fame for home remedies:
For poison ivy, scrubbing the afflicted area with Fells Naptha soap.
Three words- Cod liver oil
And most of all, the pinnacle of public humiliation, the spit bath. Dad would lick his thumbs and then vigorously rub whatever was on your face off so hard that you felt he was breaking the skin. Think of it as an indian-burn on the cheek. To make the humilaition worse, it was usually prefaced with the following statement:
“Come here- you have something on your puss.” For those of you who are aghast, ‘puss’ meant something completely different to German families when my dad was growing up.
I am serious- some of this stuff would pass as child abuse these days.