Remedies

I mentioned in an earlier post that I’d helped clean out my aunt’s house after she passed, and that she tended to never throw things out. Like, ever. I found a bottle of iodine marked 29 cents, and a bottle of mecurochrome, 39 cents. I had a vivid memory of my grandmother putting one or the other of these on any cut or scrape I got. The sliding open of the narrow row of mirrored medicine cabinets. The brown bottle. The little glass post that was dipped down into the bottle to bring up the tiniest drop of iron-colored liquid. The cringing away from it. The burn. Grandma cooing soothing words. All of this came so clearly to mind when I found those bottles (no doubt the same vintage as the bottle my grandmother had and used on me in the mid sixties) like it had all happened yesterday.

Today we don’t put a liquid with mercury in it onto the cuts and scrapes of young children. I looked online and there is still such a thing as mercurochrome, but it clearly says “non-mercury formula” on the label. And it’s not 39 cents. This nostalgic mind trip made me stop and consider all the things I still do use, thinking they have some healing properties based on nothing like real science. Arnica—-no scientific evidence that it works on bruising. Epsom salts—-I would swear on the soothing effects of Epsom salts—but again, there is no evidence that it does anything when added to bathwater. What else? I should go through my old wives’ tales thoroughly. I am a person of science and should not fall prey to hokum. On the other hand, maybe we don’t know what we don’t know about some of this stuff.