My grandma, age 58, grew up in Yugoslavia until the Serbs drove her and my mom out of the house they lived in and she has the weirdest remedies for common diseases and accidents.
Since dogs were common in Croatia a dog bit sometimes her. Her remedy was to wash it with a chemical similar to hydrogen peroxide. She would pour it on the wound. Later after the pain stopped; she would put a special “salad” as she calls it, on the wound
When my grandma was little she had fevers very frequently. Her mom used to take a raw potato, cut it in bite-sized pieces, and shoved them between her toes. Now I take Tylenol or other medicines. If she had a stomachache or she ate too much her mother would heat up a cup of oil and gently place it on her stomach. For paper cuts the procedure was similar to the dog bite except no hydrogen peroxide was used.
The strangest I thought though, was the treatment for blisters. Once my mom told me a story of the time she hit her head on a corner of a swing set while swinging, and she got a huge blister. She ran inside screaming and inside there was a doctor talking to her mom. You’d think that the doctor would have a better remedy than the kind her grandma would use but he didn’t. Her mom quickly got a knife out of the drawer and she and the doctor (who agreed that this remedy was a good one) started pushing the flat of the knife on the blister, hoping to keep it from swelling. My mom said that it hurt worse than getting the blister. I believe it.
Update: 2003/02/01 04:48:15
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