290+ Home Remedies From Appalachia

While modern medicine is a marvel, sometimes old fashioned home remedies are the best.

They’re usually simpler, faster, and more cost effective than waiting for a doctor’s appointment, paying the copay, and then having to purchase a prescription.

And a lot of time our ailments don’t need medicine! They need Grandma’s old fashioned home remedy.

Both of my grandmothers grew up dirt-floor-poor.

One moved from city to city after a series of step-dads abandoned her and her mother.

My mother’s mother was a second generation German immigrant who grew up in a family of brick makers in North Dakota.

Both had to rely on their own home remedies and skill to treat their families’ ailments.

To celebrate the home herbalists, I’ve collected as many home remedies as I could find.

Some of them work, some don’t.

Some make sense, some are crazy.

Whether educational or entertaining, I can’t get enough of these home remedies!

Use them at your own risk!

If you like these old fashioned remedies, check out my post on 140+ Old Wives Tales From Around the World.

Of if you’re just getting started in your herbal journey, check out my book, The Beginner’s Guide to Herbal Medicine.

Home Remedies from Appalachia

ARTHRITIS

• Drink a mixture of honey, vinegar, and moonshine.
• Make a tea from either the seeds or leaves of alfalfa.
• Drink powdered rhubarb dissolved in white whiskey.

ASTHMA

• In one pint of gin, place several pieces of the heartwood of a pine tree. Leave them in the gin until they turn brown. Then take one teaspoonful of the mixture twice a day.
• Suck salty water up your nose.
• Smoke or sniff rabbit tobacco.
• Swallow a handful of spider webs rolled into a ball.
• Keep a Chihuahua dog around the house.
• Smoke strong tobacco until you choke.
• Drill a hole in a black oak or sourwood tree just above the head of the victim, and put a lock of his hair in the hole. When he passes that spot in height, he will be cured. (Another person told us that if the person died, the tree would also.)
• Drink a mixture of honey, lemon juice, and whiskey, using about a tablespoon of each.
• Gather leaves from ginseng, dry and powder them. Put the powder in a pan, place a hot coal on top of it, and inhale the smoke.

BLEEDING

• Place a spider web across the wound.
• Apply a poultice of spirit turpentine and brown sugar to the wound.
• Apply lamp black directly to the wound.
• Use a mixture of soot from the chimney and lard.
• If the cut is small, wet a cigarette paper and place this over it.
• Use kerosene oil, but be careful not to add too much or it will blister the skin.
• Use pine resin.

BLOOD—BUILDERS

• When the sap is up, take the green bark of the wild cherry and boil it to make tea.
• Take leaves of the lady’s slipper, dry them, and beat them to a powder (you can wrap them in a rag to do this). Put this powder into a can, add water, let sit, and then give a spoonful three times a day.
• Take the young leaves of the poke plant, parboil them, season, fry, and then eat several “messes.”
• Make sassafras tea, using the roots of the plant.
• Put some yellowroot in a quart can of whiskey, and let the root soak it up. Add some cherry bark for flavor

BROKEN ARM

• Make a mixture of red clay and water. Put splints on each side of the arm and plaster it up with the clay. When the clay dries, put the arm in a sling.

BURNS

• Put hot coals on the burned place and pour water over them. The steam will draw the fire out.
• Powder hot coals and put this warm powder on the burn.
• Boil chestnut leaves and place the resulting ooze on the burn.
• Take table salt and dissolve it in warm water. Wrap the burn in gauze and keep it constantly warm and moist with applications of the salt water.
• Bind castor oil and egg whites around the wound with a clean cloth.
• The scrapings of a raw white potato will draw the fire.
• Linseed oil will draw the fire out.
• Scrape the inside of a white potato. Put the scrapings on the burn and leave them there until they turn black and the sore turns white. Then add a salve made of talcum powder and Vaseline.
• If the person has never seen his father, he can draw the fire by blowing on the burn.
• Use lard and flour.
• Use a mixture of Sloan’s salve and Japanese oil and petroleum jelly.
• Put axle grease on the burned area.

CHEST CONGESTION

• Make a poultice of kerosene, turpentine, and pure lard (the latter prevents blistering). Use wool cloth soaked with the mixture. Place cheesecloth on chest for protection, and then add the wool poultice. Heat mutton tallow and apply it directly to chest.
• Place a large quantity of rock candy in a little white whiskey to make a thick syrup. Take a few spoonfuls of this several times a day.
• Apply a mixture of camphor, mutton tallow, soot, pine tar, turpentine, and lard to chest.
• Make an onion poultice by roasting an onion, then wrapping it in spun-wool rags and beating it so that the onion juice soaks the rags well. Apply these rags to chest.
• Eat raw honey.
• Render the fat of a polecat. Eat two or three spoonfuls. This brings up the phlegm.
• Mix up hog lard, turpentine, and kerosene. Rub it on chest.
• Rub groundhog oil and goose oil on chest. Then cover with a hot flannel cloth.
• Wear a flannel shirt with turpentine and lard on it all winter.

COLDS

• Make a tea from the leaves of boneset. Drink the tea when it has cooled. It will make you sick if taken hot. Leaves of this plant may also be cured out and saved for use in teas during the winter months.
• Make a tea from powdered ginger, or ground up ginger roots. Do not boil the tea, but add the powdered root to a cup of hot water and drink. Add honey and whiskey, if desired.
• Boil pine needles to make a strong tea. (Or try my lemon and ginger honey recipe)
• Take as much powdered quinine as will stay on the blade of a knife, add to water, and drink.
• Parch red pepper in front of a fire. Powder it, cook it in a tea, and add pure white corn liquor.
• Put goose-grease salve on chest.
• Drink lamb’s tongue and whiskey tea.
• Drink whiskey and honey mixed.
• Drink red pepper tea.
• Eat onions roasted in ashes (good for children).
• Eat a mixture of honey and vinegar.
• Make a tea by putting some pine top needles and boneset in boiling water. You can sweeten it with honey or syrup.
• Drink tea made from wintergreen fern.
• Make a combination tea from boneset leaves and horsemint leaves.
• Take a three-pound can of pine twigs and rabbit tobacco. Boil together and strain. Drink some every three hours, taking no more than one full juice glass within a twelve-hour period.
• Drink some of the brine from kraut put up in churn jars. It makes you thirsty, and you drink lots of water. (Or try this small-batch Sauerkraut recipe)

COLIC

• Tie an asafetida bag around a baby’s neck for six months to keep away six months’ colic.
• Take one pinch of soda in a spoon of water.
• Drink Sampson’s snake root tea.
• Feed the baby breast milk with one drop of kerosene or one drop of asafetida in it.
• Chew some camel root and swallow the juice.
• Massage stomach lightly with warm towels or warm castor oil.
• Chew ginseng root.
• Drink some asafetida and whiskey mixed in milk or water.
• Boil two or three roots of ginseng in a pint of water, then strain and drink

CONSTIPATION

• Gather the roots of mayapple, cut out the joints, and dry the middle of the root. Place in a cloth and beat to a powder. Add a few drops of castor oil and roll into pills. They keep very well. You can also put a pinch of powder in food, or put in some syrup.

COUGH

• Mix one teaspoon of white whiskey with a pinch of sugar, heat over a fire, and drink.
• Eat a mixture of honey and vinegar.
• Put some ground ginger from the store in a saucer and add a little sugar. Put it on the tongue just before bedtime. It burns the throat and most of the time will stop coughs.
• Take some rock candy with tea.
• Take a teacup of roots and stems of red horsemint, boil in a pint of water for two or three minutes, strain, and drink.
• Dissolve four sticks of horehound candy in a pint of whiskey and take a couple of spoonfuls a day. This is also good for TB.
• Boil one cup of wild cherry bark in a pint of water. Add some syrup and cook until it gets thick.
• Make a cough syrup using the roots of about six lion’s-tongue plants. Boil them in about a teacup of water, sweeten with syrup, then simmer until thick. Take a spoonful a few times a day until your cough is gone.
• Boil a handful of mullen roots and leaves in a pint of water to make a light tea. Add sugar or syrup to sweeten. Take only a spoonful at a time.
• Parch leaves of rat’s vein and grind them to a powder. Put a pinch on your hand and snort it.
• Make a cough syrup by boiling a handful each of wild cherry bark, black gum bark, and whole rat’s vein plants in a half a gallon of water. Simmer for one to two hours; strain, add one pint of sugar, and boil again until it makes a thin syrup.

CRAMPS

• To cure cramps in the feet, turn your shoes upside down before going to bed.

CROUP

• Squeeze the juice out of a roasted onion and drink.
• Render out some mutton tallow, add beeswax to this, and place it on the back underneath the victim’s shirt.
• Add a little vinegar, lemon, or onion to honey and eat.
• Put a drop of turpentine in a spoonful of sugar and eat.
• Drink a thick syrup made of onion juice and honey.
• For a baby pour a mixture of turpentine and white whiskey into a saucer and set it afire. Hold the baby over the smoke until he breathes it deeply. This loosens him up.
• Take homemade lard, turpentine, and kerosene and make a poultice which is bound in a wool cloth over the chest and around the neck.
• Put some groundhog oil on some hot flannel rags and place the rags on the child’s chest.
• Boil an onion, some turpentine, and some lard together. Pour the juice on a cloth and put it on the chest.
• Get a pine knot, split it up fine, and light it. Hold fat meat over the fire. Take the resin and fat to cure the cough.

DIARRHEA

• Take a tea of red oak bark.
• Drink some blackberry juice.

DROPSY

• The following is a remedy that Dr. John Fowler found handwritten, carefully folded and tucked away in an old book. It is presented here as written. “A receipt for the dropsy 3 qts of apple vinegar nine bunches of black snake root three bunches of sinaker snaker root three hanful of stare root three hanful of cammil flours too hanful of worm wood forty five new nails put them all in a iron oven set them in the coroner by the fier let it stand nine days till it works then rige out [“rige,” sometimes spelled “rench,” means strain or remove foreign matter] and in the same oven add one bottle of rum one pound of sugar then set on a slow fier simer it down four days to too bottls full one spoonful at a dose eat no fat meat and no sweat milk keep out of the rain and dew.”

DYSENTERY

• Take high proof liquor, put it in a cup and set it afire, and after it burns and goes out, drink what’s left.
• Drink some blackberry juice.
• Drink a tea made of strawberry leaves.
• Peel off first layer of bark from a persimmon tree. Take the next layer of soft bark and swallow three mouthfuls of the juice. You can also use white oak bark.
• Dig up two dewberry root vines and boil the roots in a quart of water, strain.
• Make a tea of willow leaves. “It cures the dysentery nine times out of ten”—Aunt Arie

EARACHE

• Pour drops of juice from the buddie blooms (sweet shrub) into ear.
• Dissolve table salt in lukewarm water and pour this into ear. This dissolves the wax which is causing the pain.
• Put either wet ashes wrapped in a cloth, or hot ashes in a sack on ear and hold there.
• Save the liquid that boils out of the ends of hickory and persimmon wood when burned, and pour this liquid into ear.
• Pour castor oil, or sweet oil, or British oil into ear. (Or Garlic Oil – check out my post on medicinal benefits of garlic)
• Put several drops of sewing machine oil in ear. (One person claimed that the reason this worked so well was that our body is a machine too.)
• Roast cabbage stalks and squeeze the juice into ear.
• Break apart a Betty bug at the neck, and squeeze one or two drops of blood into ear.
• Warm a spoonful of urine and put a few drops in ear.
• Hold your head close to a hot lamp.
• Put a few ashes in an old rag. Dampen it with hot water and sleep with your head on it.

EYE AILMENTS

• Put a few drops of castor oil in eye.
• A sty can be removed by running the tip of a black cat’s tail over it.

FEVER

• Tie a bag containing the sufferer’s nail paring to a live eel. It will carry the fever away.
• Snakeroot tea will bring it down.
• Boil two roots of wild ginger in a cup of water, strain, and drink.
• Boil a cup of pennyroyal leaves in a pint of water and drink.

FLU

• Gather some boneset, put the leaves in a sack, and put it in the sun to dry. Make sure it has air or it will mold. Then cook the leaves in some water, strain, and drink.
• Chew rabbit tobacco.

FRETFUL CHILD

• Boil catnip leaves to make a tea, and give the child about a quarter cup. Use one cup of leaves to a pint of water to make him sleep.

GALL BLADDER TROUBLE

• Take a spoonful of pure corn whiskey and Black Draught.

HEADACHES

• Bind wilted beet leaves on the forehead.
• Tie a flour sack around your head.
• Put several ginseng roots in a piece of brown paper and tie to your head.
• Put turpentine and beef tallow in a bandage and tie it tightly around your head.
• Pour hot water over mustard leaves to rouse their odor and strength. Bind these leaves in a poultice to head with a cheesecloth strip.
• Smear brow with crushed onions.
• When you get your hair cut, gather up all the clippings. Bury them under a rock and you will never have a headache. Old-timers would never allow their hair to be burned or thrown away as it was too valuable.
• Use a poultice of horseradish leaves.
• Rub camphor and white whiskey on head.

HEART TROUBLE

• Make a tea of heartleaf leaves and take two or three tablespoons three times a day. One person said she would boil the heart leaves together with leaves from the rat’s vein plant.
• Take root of a bleeding heart, break it up, and make a tea of it.
• Eat ramps and garlic. You can eat them cooked or raw.

HICCUPS

• Take a teaspoon of peanut butter.
• Put half a teacup of dried apples in a teacup of water in a pot. Bring to a boil, stirring occasionally. Strain out the remains of the apples, and drink the juice while hot.

INSOMNIA

• Make a tea of boneset leaves, using one tablespoonful. You may use them fresh or dried.

IRRITATION CAUSED BY INSECTS
BEE STINGS—

• Chew or mash ragweed and put it on sting to deaden pain and reduce swelling.
• Put moist snuff, mud, tobacco juice, or red clay on it.
• Put castor oil on it.
• Take seven different kinds of leaves. Wad and twist them together, tear the wad in half, and rub the sting.
• Place either turpentine, chewed tobacco, tobacco juice, kerosene, or a mixture of sugar and dough on the sting. Any of these will relieve the pain and draw out the poison.
• Crush a few chrysanthemum leaves and rub the juice on the sting.

PACKSADDLE STINGS—

• Chew or mash ragweed and put it on the sting to deaden pain.

CHIGGER BITES—

• To relieve itching and infection, rub chewed snuff or tobacco over the bites.
• Make a mixture of butter and salt to stop itching.

SPIDER BITES—

• If bitten by a black widow spider, drink liquor heavily from 3 P.M. to 7 P.M. YOU won’t get drunk, you’ll be healed.

BUGS—

• For head lice (cooties), shingle hair close and use Kerosene.
• For chinches or bed bugs, burn sulfur in a closed house.

IRRITATIONS OF THE SKIN
HIVES—

• Boil chestnut oak leaves and apply the resulting dark juice to the affected areas. Or take any of a variety of teas to break them out. These teas include catnip, ground ivy, a tea made from the mashed up berries of the tread-save, red alder leaves, raw alder bark scraped uphill, or a tea from cockle burrs. Wrap the latter in a rag and make the tea by straining.
• Make a catnip tea using ten leaves of catnip. Boil it in one and a half or two cups of water. Take a teaspoon three or four times a day. Especially good for babies.

POISON IVY—

• Use a mixture of buttermilk or vinegar and salt.
• Make a strong brown tea by boiling willow leaves, and put the tea on the affected area.
• Take some witch hazel and add all the boric acid that will dissolve in it. Apply to all affected parts of the skin.
• Rub wild touch-me-not on the area.
• Rub the infection with the inside surface of a banana.
• Slice open a green tomato and run the juice over the affected area.
• Apply either linseed oil, a mixture of epsom salts and baking soda, white shoe polish, or the water drawn off cooked oatmeal.
• One can also blister the irritated spots with turpentine, or add half a teaspoonful of soda to half a pint of buttermilk and bathe the affected areas.

OKRA STING—

• Put four ounces of good live copperas in one quart of boiling water and let cool. Wash affected areas with water as hot as you can bear it for twenty minutes about four times a day

ERYSIPELAS (skin disease)—

• Use a poultice of peach tree leaves and corn meal.
• Make a salve of balm of Gilead buds fried in mutton tallow. Add Vaseline if you wish. The best tallow to use is McQueen’s Pure Mutton Tallow which is available in many A&Ps.

ITCH—

• Use sulfur and lard.
• Use gunpowder and sulfur.
• Wash some yellowroot and put it on the affected area.

INFLAMMATION—

• Bind salty fat meat to a stone bruise or a thorn in the foot to draw out the inflammation.
• A poultice of clay will do the same thing.
• To kill infection, pour some turpentine or kerosene mixed with sugar on the affected area.
• Make a tea of poke roots by boiling them in water for a couple of minutes. Dip a cloth in it and rub on the affected area. (Be careful not to get any in your mouth.)

FRECKLES—

• Buttermilk and lemon juice mixed together and put on freckles will remove them.
• Put sap from a grapevine on them.
• Put stump water on them.
• Make a poultice of eggs, cream, and epsom salts, and spread on the freckles. Take off after it dries.

CHAPPED HANDS—

• Rub pine resin on them.
• Rub hands with mutton tallow.
• Wash or pick wool. The lanolin in it will be good for the skin.

ATHLETE’S FOOT—

• Wrap a wool string around the toe, or step in cow dung that is fresh.

SWEATY FEET—

• Boil dried chestnut leaves until you have an ooze. Apply this to the feet.

KIDNEY TROUBLE

• Make a tea from dried trailing arbutus leaves.
• Eat one or two pokeberries a day for a couple of days.
• Drink some red alder tea.
• Take one root from a queen-of-the-meadow plant. Boil it in one pint of water until it makes a dark tea. Strain and drink a cup a day until you are well.

LIVER TROUBLE

• Make a tea of lion’s tongue leaves by boiling a few leaves in water, then straining. Add syrup if you want to sweeten it.
• Wash a couple of roots from the spignet plant, boil them for a few minutes in a pint of water and strain. Drink about a cup a day when your liver is acting up.

HOME REMEDIES FOR MEASLES

• Any herb tea will break them out.
• Make a tea of sheep dung to break them out.
• Boil red alder branches and drink the tea.
• Keep the person home and out of the cold. Then give him some whiskey to drink. Use a few drops for tiny children and a tablespoon for adults. It will make the person sweat.

NAIL PUNCTURE

• Put some old wool rags into an old tin can, pour kerosene over the rags and light. Then smoke the wound.
• Take a hammer and draw the nail out. Grease the nail and put it away somewhere to prevent lockjaw.
• Pour kerosene oil over the cut, or soak it in same three times a day. This will also remove the soreness.
• Mix lard with soot from the chimney, thin with turpentine, and pack around the wound.
• Pour pine oil over the wound.
• Mix biscuit flour with buttermilk until a dough forms. Pack this dough in a poultice of sugar and turpentine.
• Tie it up in a poultice of sugar and turpentine.

NOSEBLEED

• Take a small piece of lead and bore a hole in it. Put a string through the hole, tie it, and wear it around your neck. Your nose won’t bleed again.
• Place a nickel directly under the nose between the upper lip and the gum and press tightly.
• Lie down and put a dime on your heart.
• Sniff devil’s snuff box or some puff balls, and it will stop.
• Hang a pair of pot hooks about your neck.
• Place scissors, points up, on your neck.

PAIN KILLER

• Roast some poke roots by the fire. Scrape them clean with a
• knife and grind up. Make a poultice out of the powder and apply
• to the bottom of the foot. It will draw pain out of anywhere in
• the body.

PNEUMONIA

• To bring down the fever, put some quinine and hog lard on a cloth and put it on your chest.
• Give the person two teaspoonsful of oil rendered from a skunk.
• Make an onion poultice to make the fever break. Then give the person whiskey and hot water.
• Make a tea of butterfly weed, add a little whiskey, and drink it.

RHEUMATISM

• Roast a poke root in ashes in the same manner as you would roast a potato. While it is still hot, apply it to the inflamed joint. This eases the pain and reduces the swelling.
• Drink a mixture of pokeberry wine and whiskey.
• Let rattleroot, ginseng, red corn root, wild cherry bark, and golden seal root sit in one gallon of white whiskey. Drink small portions of the resulting liquid as needed.
• Rub some wildcat oil on the skin.
• Drink a tea made from the seeds or leaves of the alfalfa plant.
• Cook garlic in your food to ease the pain.
• Carry a buckeye or an Irish potato until it gets hard.

RISIN’S

• Place an elm bark poultice over the bump.
• Scrape the white of an Irish potato and place the scrapings on the bump. Bind them on with a clean cloth. This will draw the risin’ (boil) to a head.
• The inside surface of the bark of the lind tree (basswood) will draw it to a head.
• Take raw fat meat (the fattest you can get), cut a thin slice of it, and bind it over the bump with a cloth bandage. This draws it to a head, and when you pull the cloth off, a tiny hole is left in the center of the lump. Make a thread loop and ease this loop into the hole and twist several times; then yank the core of the risin’ out with a swift motion.
• Eat sulfur mixed with honey.
• Take the skin out of eggshells, and place it on the risin’s. Put a wilted running briar leaf on it, wrap with a cloth, and leave on overnight.
• Scrape some bark from a sevenbark (wild hydrangea) bush, grind it up, boil it in enough water to cover for a few minutes. Make a poultice of it, put it on the risin’, and it will draw it out very quickly.

SORES

• Put butter around the sore so a dog will lick it. The dog’s saliva will cure it.
• Put a little lard or something equally greasy on the sore. Then dust the sore with sulfur. The grease will hold the sulfur on.
• Make a salve of white pine resin and mutton tallow.
• Don’t ever burn the cloth bandage from a sore; you must bury it for the sore to heal.
• Mash up yellowroot and put it on the sores.
• Use a salve made from mutton tallow, balm of Gilead buds, and fresh turpentine from pine trees.

HOME REMEDIES FOR SORE THROAT

• Bake onions in an open fireplace; then tie them around your throat.
• Make a poultice of kerosene, turpentine, and pure lard (to prevent blistering), and place this on your neck. In five minutes you will be able to taste the kerosene in your throat, and the cure will have begun. Then take two or three drops of kerosene oil in a spoon with a pinch of sugar and swallow this to complete the treatment.
• Gargle with honey and vinegar.
• Rub pine oil on your throat.
• Gargle with salty water.
• Put a drop of kerosene on a lump of sugar and eat it.
• Gargle with a half cup water, two tablespoons vinegar, and a half teaspoon of salt.
• Take a sock you have worn inside a boot and worked in for almost a week so that it has a bad odor. Tie it around your neck.

STOMACH TROUBLE

• Make a tea of wild peppermint and drink it.
• Drink some blackberry juice or wine.
• Drink some juice from kraut left over after cooking.
• Chew calamus root or yellowroot and swallow the juice.
• Make a tea of golden seal roots and drink it.
• To stop vomiting, grind up some peach trees leaves in a rag.
• Put the rag with the ground leaves in it on the person’s stomach.
• To settle the stomach, place five small flint rocks in a glass of water. Let it sit for a few minutes and drink.

TONSIL TROUBLE

• Gargle with tan bark tea made from chestnut leaves.
• Smear balm of Gilead salve all over the person’s chest.
• Gargle with salt water.
• To burn out tonsils, paint them several times a day for several months with iodine and turpentine.

TOOTHACHE

• Make a small amount of wine from pokeberries, and mix one part of the wine with eight parts white whiskey. Take a small spoonful just a couple of times a day. It’s also good for rheumatism and muscle cramps.
• Put drops of vanilla straight from the bottle on the tooth.
• Buy some Bluestone in a store and put a drop of it on the tooth. It kills the nerve.
• Use burned alum.
• Put some homemade tobacco in a corncob pipe. Light it, and draw the smoke over the tooth.
• Hold whiskey or turpentine on the tooth.
• Put some damp ashes on a cloth, and hold against the sore tooth.
• Put a few ashes in an old rag and dampen it with hot water. Sleep with your head on it.

WARTS

• Stick the hand which has warts on it into a bag and tie it up. The first person who opens it will get your warts. Get something like a penny that someone would want to pick up. Put some blood from the wart on it and throw it into the road. When someone picks it up, the wart will go away.
• Wet your finger and make a cross on the wart.
• Take a persimmon stick and put as many notches on it as you have warts. They will go away.
• Count them, touching each one as you do, and say a verse which is secret and known only to you, the conjuror.
• Tie a horsehair around it.
• Rub the wart with the skin of a chicken gizzard, then hide the skin under a rock. The wart will disappear.
• Count the warts. Tie as many pebbles as there are warts in a bag and throw this bundle down in the fork of a road. They will soon go away.
• Steal a neighbor’s dishrag. Wipe it across the warts and bury it in the woods.
• Wash the affected area with water from a rotten chestnut stump for nine mornings in a row before breakfast.
• Rub the warts with a rock and put it in a box. Whoever opens the box will get the warts.
• Rub a flint rock three times over the warts and put it back where you got it from. They will disappear.
• Cut the wart, make it bleed, and put one drop of the blood on a grain of corn. Feed the grain of corn to a chicken or rooster and the wart will disappear.
• Put the juice from a milkweed on it every day for two weeks.
• Put a small piece of bacon or salt pork on the wart. Wrap it up and sleep with it that way. In the morning the wart will be gone if you have faith.
• Pick the wart with a needle, and put a few drops of the blood on some fat meat. Bury the meat, and when it rots the wart will go away.

WHOOPING COUGH

• Take a half cup of brown sugar, the juice of three lemons, two egg whites, and one bottle of olive oil. Mix these up together and give one teaspoonful of the mixture.
• Drink mare’s milk.
• Boil chestnut leaves in water, drain, add honey, and drink.

WORMS

• In the early spring, pick the small tender leaves of the poke plant. Boil the leaves, drain them, and cook in grease from fatback. Eat a mess of these.
• Take “worm syrup” which is made by boiling Jerusalem oak and pine root together.
• Take the shells of a hen’s egg and bake them until they turn brown and brittle. Crumble them up fine and mix the particles with syrup and butter. Feed this to the sick person every morning for one week. The particles cut the worms to pieces. This remedy also
  works for dogs and other animals.
• Eat tobacco seeds.
• Eat a head of garlic every day until they are gone.
• For ringworm, crack open green walnut hulls, crush, and apply the juice to the affected area with cotton.
• Put three or four drops of turpentine in a teaspoon of sugar and eat it.
• Put some charcoal in a quart of water and drink it.
• For tapeworm, starve it. Then hold some warm milk up to your nose and sniff deeply. The tapeworm will stick his head out of your nose to get the milk. Hold the milk farther and farther away from him, thus drawing him out.

YELLOW JAUNDICE

• Scrape a cow’s horn, boil the scrapings, and drink.

PREVENTIVES, CURE-ALLS

SPRING TONICS – 

• Take wild cherry tree bark, yellow poplar bark, and yellowroot boiled, strained, and mixed with white liquor.
• Mix together some sulfur and molasses, and eat it.
• Eat rhubarb once a week.

SALVES—

• Take about two tablespoons of mutton tallow, and heat it up in a frying pan with about six balm of Gilead buds. Mash the buds up while the mixture cools, and when the grease is all out of the buds, strain the mixture. Put it in a jar and cover it. The salve is clear, and will keep for years.
• Take one cup of pine resin, about one ounce of camphor-phcnique, one cup of mutton tallow, and ten to fifteen balm of Gilead buds. Put it all in a frying pan and heat until liquid. Mash the buds until all the juice is out of them. Strain and put into jars and cover. Makes about a pint.

RANDOM – 

• For bed-wetting, feed the child a couple of elderberries or red sumac (“shumate”) berries before bedtime.
• For any serious child illness, take some blood from the child’s arm, put it on a grain of corn, and feed it to a black hen.
• To prevent taking contagious diseases, tie asafetida around the neck.
• A piece of nutmeg tied around the neck will prevent neuralgia.
• Place a Bible under your pillow, and you will never have nightmares.
• Give a grouchy person a tea made from violet blossoms.
• To help hair grow, break a section of a grape vine, set in a bottle, and let the juice drain. Rub the juice in your hair.

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