The Dam Good Tour

Book review by Jeanine Plumer. In the year 2001

From 1961 through 1966, a mere forty years ago, a 170 Texas A & M students were given an assignment to interview Texas residents concerning folk medicine and practices. Most of those interviewed lived in Harris, Dallas, Bexar and Tarrant counties. Texas Folk Remedies, by John Q Anderson, is a collection of the information gathered. The book is certainly insightful and empowering for those who have issues with modern medicine and would like to return to the more natural cures, used during the good old days we have heard so much about. The 91 page book certainly suggests many remedies; few caught my attention more than others.

One remedy involves our largest organ, and most visible, the skin.

Skin ailments are ones you just can’t deny, unless you wear a long sleeve shirt, gloves, pants but acne can be obvious. To clear up acne, Texas Folk Remedies suggest that you either wash your face with a wet soiled diaper, or make an overnight face mask with moist cow manure and rinse the manure off in the morning with milk.

I remember having ringworm as a child. Though this publication was available, my mother did not read it. I know this because she applied some sort of ointment provided by our doctor, rather than the saliva of a calf, or kerosene, or horse manure, as was the practice for users of folk medicine. Plagued by an ingrown toenail. Catch a lizard, remove its liver, and tie one end of a leather string around the liver and the other around your ankle. Leave it on for 9 days and your ingrown toenail will disappear.

Traveling up the human anatomy from the peninsula at the southernmost point, the toe, to the northern extreme, there is the quandary of baldness.

One folk remedy suggests that one rub axle grease and cod liver on the bald area daily. Give it a try, it may work. Or scoop up some mud from a low or dry riverbed, soak the mud in salt water for 10 minutes and then apply it to the bald area. The book does not say how long the application should remain.

I will admit, when I was young, I believed that if I picked up a toad or a frog, I would get warts. Why did I think so much about warts as a child? As an adult, I haven’t thought of warts at all, until reading this collection of folk remedies, which I happened upon at the Eanes History Center. So, If you do have a wart, and you’d rather not, just rub the wart with a with a rock, put the rock in a burlap sack and throw it over your shoulder. Soon the offensive projection will disappear.

I am curious to know how some of these remedies came into being, but the book does not address this. There is one particularly intriguing remedy, origin, unexplained, that requires a wart victim to go to a grocery store, steal a green bean, rub it on the wart, and then bury it. When the bean rots, the wort will be gone. The catch is, You can’t tell anyone you did it or it won’t work.

Learn more:

Oddly, many of the people interviewed in the book believed warts could be, I don’t know how else to explain the tradition, but sold. Rub a coin on the wort and give the money to an unsuspecting person and they will get a wart and yours will go away. I kind of wish I had a wart, so I could try some of these cures. I like this one, Put sand in a box and wrap it with like a present. Rub the package on your wart, or warts and place it at a 4 way intersection. Whoever picks up the package will get the wart. I’m pretty sure the following remedy works, with a small knife, make a hole in the wart, drop gasoline inside and ignite. You may have a hole in your arm, but the offending growth will be gon

Belle Hill Austin

https://austinghosttours.com/eanes-land-ghost/