School: An Clochar, Cathair Saidhbhín (roll number 13542)
- Location:
- Cahersiveen, Co. Kerry
- Teacher: An tSr. M. de Lourdes Stac
Archival Reference
The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0476, Page 334
Image and data © National Folklore Collection, UCD.
See copyright details.
DownloadOpen data
Available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
- XML School: An Clochar, Cathair Saidhbhín
- XML Page 334
- XML “Cures”
Note: We will soon deprecate our XML Application Programming Interface and a new, comprehensive JSON API will be made available. Keep an eye on our website for further details.
On this page
- When doctors, nurses, and medical men were few in our country, and when our modern cures were unknown, our forefathers were able to cure many ailments and diseases. How this could be possible is hard to understand, as many of them were uneducated and unlearned. It was not from books they received their knowledge but from nature and experience.
When our old people had an attack of rheumatism, instead of taking Kruschen salts they gathered an armful of nettle and lacerated the infected limb until blisters arose on the skin. This might seem very absurd to some of us, but it gave relief and deadened the pain. For biles they got a snail off a whitethorn bush and placed it on the sore, or else they made a soap and sugar plaster and tied in round the bile to extract the corrupted matter. Whenever anyone suffered from head aches which were few in those days it was thought that the only way to obtain relief was, to put a cold damp cloth around the forehead. When the cloth would be getting warm from the heat of the forehead it was again dipped into the water and again applied to the forehead. To get rid of a toothache was by no means to go to the dentist and get it out, as is the custom nowadays. A well know and efficacious cure was to put ground tobacco(continues on next page)
