Warts. (original) (raw)

As a boy, I sometimes spent the summers with my grandparents on their small farm at Slocum, an Anderson County community supposedly named because the mail delivery was "slow to come."

During one of my visits, I slipped into the hog pen to play with a batch of new pigs. The mother sow resented the intrusion and as I climbed over the fence to escape, I slipped against a protruding nail and cut a gash in the center of my chest.

It wasn't a serious wound, but my grandmother sized up the situation with alarm and summoned my grandfather. "Gus," she commanded, "fetch some axle grease."

Grandfather Gus returned with a tin of grease, and my grandmother spread it freely over the wound. The bleeding stopped immediately and in a few hours she cleaned the wound, dabbed it with a little coal oil, and tied a strip of white cloth around my chest.

If you grew up in the country, miles away from the nearest doctor, home remedies were something you accepted routinely. Using axle grease or coal oil for cuts probably made pretty good sense, especially if you got well.

In 1996, we completed "Rub Onions and Skunk Oil on my Chest and Call Me Well," a collection of home remedies and folk medicines. Most of the contributions came from older people who used the folk remedies themselves or remembered parents or grandparents who found the home medicines an essential part of rural life in Texas. We discovered a multitude of cures for warts, but they often fell more into the realm of superstition than remedies.

Several people told us to rub our warts with a rooster comb, and bury it.

Ruby Yount of Lufkin said her mother-in-law removed several warts from her kids' hands, and it was all done in privacy. She tied a knot of sewing thread over the wart, then went outside and buried it in the earth. By the time the thread rotted, the wart was gone.

Some other wart remedies include: "Warts" > Page 2

Wart Removal

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