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A malady M'Lady

K

Kandor

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In our Kitchen in Ashted Row we had a round chocolate tin full of all our Medicines.
Looking back, there always seemed to be a round tin of Germolene, once you prised the lid off you invariably found it was just a thin ring of ointment that had semi crusted around the edge....oh, and it usually had an unidentifiable piece of something in it.
Half a bottle of Calamine lotion...that was another one, especially with hardened runs of the stuff on the outside of the bottle..
Mom dabbed that on us for Heat lumps..it was only years later I knew themto be bedbug bites.
Blackjack, Moms mainstay..good for anything from Boils and Splinters toopen Heart surgery.
A folded square of cheap plasters..you cut what you needed off to size,
They lasted about 3 seconds and had the sticking power of Teflon.
Medicines..loads of them..like most folk we never threw them out just because we'd got better..
Among those beauties you could always find a ribbed bottle of white medicine with a perished cork in it...never did find out what the medicine was though.
A old razor blade..Dad used one for cutting off bunions, hard skin and slicing boils.
Fullers Earth..Why? I dont even know what it is..
Cough medicine, brown thick and sticky..I think it stopped us coughing by glueing the insides of our throat together
Witch Hazel for red eyes although usually Mom tipped wet tea leaves into a bit of damp cloth..by the 'eck..the flavour floods out.
A much used Nit comb..usually in Brown or black
And some nameless purple lotion...
No one ever seemed to fill our tin up back then yet it never seemed to empty.
I know something though..you never found Aspirin or allergy stuff.. A headache you got on with with it and think back..who did you know with an allergy?
 
Sounds just like the tin Mom had,
plus Little Liver pills in case anyone was liverish - what was that all about?

Styes were treated with a rub from her wedding ring.

You are so right about allergies.
I am asthmatic,allergic to house dust mites, they flourish in fitted carpets, not lino, so no problem there in our house 50 years ago.Also allergic to wine,can anyone remember having wine in the house then.
I am also allergic to some perfumes obviously not Evening in Paris and Californian Poppy because I wasn't asthmatic as a kid.

Was the purple stuff Gentian violet used for everything from spots to ringworm.
Remember mom warning us not to play with kids with little bald violet patches on their scalp.
 
We didn't have a medicine tin, if you cut yourself you had to hunt for ages to find a plaster, and the universal medicine, Parish's Food was in the cupboard by the side of the fireplace. The one thing always to hand was dad's Carter's Little Liver Pills, he kept them on the sideboard...........
 
:angel: I for one did have an allergy to most 'Vegies' and still do! However as I was classed as odd anyway 'Far too small', 'AB negative Blood' to say nothing of always wanting to 'Pee' because of under of one developed kidney and one extra large one.
No one took to much notice and I just had to get on with it, not like today where a lot of kid's are given far more medication than what they need. While there are others don't get enough.

Chris :angel:
 
I could say snap to the above posts pretty well. We had a medicine cabinet in the bathroom with a lot of the above mentioned items in them. The old ribbed medicine bottles some marked Poison, with tiny amounts of whatever resided there along with the Dentifrice powder, the Andrew's Liver salts. Beecham's powders were bought when needed. The plasters as Les mentioned were useless. My father bought home the odd thing from the medicine box that was in his MEB van!!!!! I suffered from sties on my eyelids in my early teens so an eyebath was in the cabinet I remember. A tattered box of Epsom Salts, some Germolene, much in the same condition as Les remembers his tin....a small jar of Mentholatum for late night back and chest pummels by Mom when we couldn't sleep for coughing and after the pummels we felt like we were freezing. Certainly, Fryers Balsam was in there and a couple of bandages and some cottonwool. Things just simply got put in this cabinet and stayed in there. Years later I came home and found the old Poison bottles still there and binned them, they must have been there for l5 years!!!!

Chris, we kept our sewing items in a large Quality Street toffee tin....a lovely tangle that was! What was Quality House please?
 
Jenny Ann, I still keep my sewing things in a Quality Street tin, and like yours it is a tangled mess.

Like most households we had almost all the items mentioned in earlier posts about our "medicine chest" but ours also had Indian Cerete a type of ointment, lint, gauze, and something to soothe my eldest sister's chilblains but I can't think of the name at the moment. and a little blue jar of Vick.
 
My Mom always had a "blue bag" in our medicine tin ( which was a Fillery's Toffee tin) She used it on bee stings . :-\
 
Yep, Postie we had the bluebag treatment for bee and wasp stings. We had butter rubbed on bruises, and iodine on cuts - and didn't it sting. ???
 
All we had was a defibrillator, an MRI machine, X-Ray, Operating theatre, 5cwt Plaster of Paris, 2 gallons of Morphine, endoscope, stethascope, kaleidescope, and a needle & thread. :)
 
Di when my son got knocked over by a car in Spain 1992 lucky he only had cuts on knees forehead and elbows but all they treated him with was iodine, he recovered I still have the iodine bottle. I'm sure it did the trick better than all the anti stuff today. :)
 
Oh Frantic..the sheer bloody deprivation..what were your parents thinking of? bringing you up without an Iron lung...
No wonder you fled to Australia..
 
We were dosed with it if we had stomach ache. I didn't mind taking a dolop of that, but my favourite dose of anything was codliver oil and malt.
 
Another standby product when I was little - Vaseline. Still use it for all sorts of things often not what it was intended for eg oiling door hinges. It's the 150th year of production!
 

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We has a little tin of Zam-buk, Mom put it on everything. I did buy some recently but of course it's not the same. Golden Eye ointment for styes, I always seemed to have one. I haven't heard of Indian Cerate siince I was a child. I like Savlon and Germolene now.
rosie.
 
We still believe in the healing power of Zam-buk and disappointed when we could no longer get it. However, about twelve months ago saw some in a catalogue. Price was terrible, about £6 for a little tin. Still bought it though. Still as good as ever.
As far as Virol is concerned, can anyone remember the picture on it of two girls, they were my cousins, [at least I think it was virol they were on.
Yes, yak to Scotts Emulsion but Yum to Codliver oil and malt
 
In our medicine tin were much of what you all had, and some what you had I have never heard of. In our biscuit tin with a dark red lid. Four Oils the only thing that decongested me. We had a red flat round tin of yellow I think it might have been basilicon, Nan called it Yeller Mazellicar, very gooey but good for cuts and scrazes. Boric Acid Powder she called Borassic. Oil of Clove in a tiny bottle with cotton wool and a matchstick selotaped to it. The same went for ear drops in a rubber squeezable dropper. All sorts of bandages, cotton wool pads, lint and gauze, Bonjela. A brown cough medicine, with a thick white liquid the brown floated you had to shake it. Some thick pink liquid in a clear bottle. (They put purple stuff on a lad's hair at school when he had nits.) A tin of Quickies. TCP. Wytch Hazel. A liquid flowery smelling plastic camphor bottle. Pongy rub. (Nan's cupboards had arrow root, liquorice root, glycerine. Haliborange tablets. Sulphur tablets. Iron tablets.) Arnica in a green hexagonal bottle, a dark blue bottle with a cork? Some loose corks. Big pink nappy pins. Syrop of figs. corn plasters. A small round flat brown bottle of smelling salts. A watch key for black heads. Nan used dock leaves and spit for stings and nettle rash. And an split ivy leaf in her shoe for her sore fayte.
 
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