Our great-great-grandparents lived longer than us way before the technological age and the advent of modern medicine.Now medicine is controlled by big insurance companies and subsidized by the government. Most of their medicines consisted of old-time cures.Even though they had doctors, they mostly took care of their own aches, pains and discomforts. Remember, they didn’t have insurance back then.They believed one’s hair could turn white from fright. If you had a wart on your neck, you’d go down to the hog pen and find the place where the hog rubbed his neck against the fence and then rub your neck in the same spot.To get rid of lice you put your clothes on an anthill, and then wash your head in kerosene. After that you’d sprinkle your head with sea salt, then part your hair and pour raw whiskey on your scalp and keep it on for 48 hours. Caution: don’t smoke or get near the fire!Boils were cured by soaking the heel of homemade bread in hot milk and binding the hot, wet bread around the affected part. This works!It was believed that if you ate three almonds a day you wouldn’t die of cancer. Colds were cured by eating an onion sandwich. Pierced ears cured bad eyesight, and the light from the snow in May was good for eye sores.Stuttering was cured if you hit the stutterer in the mouth with a chicken gizzard, and rabies was cured if you seared the bite with a hot iron.If you had freckles you took a small flat fish from the sea and held it firmly against your skin until the fish died. This was also a cure for whooping cough. If you suffered with a headache you’d sleep with a scissors under your pillow.In the morning, the headache would be gone. If you had arthritis you’d have a cat sit on your knees or you’d put two horse chestnuts in each pants pocket. A black eye required a cold tallow candle on it, and a spider web was put on a bleeding cut. A raw onion was cut in half and set on the window sill to prevent a cold.They believed that boils came from impure blood, so they ate sorghum molasses, raisins and onions. An iron key pressed against the back of the neck stopped a nosebleed.Black chickens were good to use to bring out chickenpox, especially if you went to the chicken coop after sunset and let one fly over you. If someone came down with smallpox, he was cured by mixing one teaspoon of cream of tartar in a half pint of warm water.For all this medical advice, the cost is a sack of potatoes and a laying hen.Faye RuckhardtLansford