Ray's Corner

The Medicine Room

""...We had to work hard and we didn't have very much to do with, but anyway we were healthy and we wasn't very sick cause mother always done the dosing of us. Every spring and summer and fall when the medicine around the woods was ready to gather we had to go to the woods and we had to gather peppermint, and pennyroyal, and lobelia, and rock polypod, and sarsaparilla roots, and gold thread, and what they call burdock roots, and we gathered Balm of Gilead buds, and we had medicines for everything that was going on. Didn't make no odds what you had, we had a medicine for it. There was one room upstairs we called the medicine room and that was hanging full of medicine of all kinds. In the fall of the year, come fall of the year, well you didn't dare to cough; if you wanted to cough you had to run outdoors and cough and by the time you went "cough, cough" there was a spoon ramin' down your throat with some kind of medicine before you had a chance to get sick. So I used to put my hand over my mouth and run outdoors and cough outdoors and then go back in the house. Because the medicine was always - it was always bitter - it never tasted good; I never tasted any medicine yet that was good. We always gathered our own medicine and we didn't have too much sickness; we looked after ourselves that way and we were tough and rugged..."