As if we haven’t had enough reminders of coughs brought about by COVID, we are heading into the winter season, and with it will come more sneezing and coughing. What better time to recall some of the old ways of treating coughs and colds?

I recall a singing commercial on our local radio station during the winter months of the 1940s and ’50s. Do you remember a barbershop quartet singing, “Stop that cough. Stop that cold in the nick of time. Now don’t delay, it doesn’t pay, take Masons 49”? There was another verse, but it has left my memory bank. My memory bank does recall that Masons 49 was a dark brown, popular, but vile-tasting cough syrup. Ingredients unknown.

Ginger tea was a home remedy that I still use today. I grate about a tablespoon of fresh ginger root, add boiling water to make a tea, then add a little honey. A cup of that hot liquid clears your head and eases the urge to cough.

When I asked friends about treatments for coughs and colds which they remembered from childhood, several told me about wearing mustard plasters on their chests. The recipes for these were varied, but the most common one was to mix a quantity of dry mustard powder with a bit of lard and spread it on the chest – both front and back. Then a piece of flannel was wrapped around the chest. The premise of this remedy was to heat the skin and draw out the congestion in one’s chest.

Along the same lines, was a peach-coloured cotton wool called Thermogene. According to Wikipedia, Thermogene Medicated Wadding is impregnated with capsicum oleoresin and methyl salicylate. Heat was produced when the product combined with perspiration. A square put on your chest was supposed to ease your cough. For the uninitiated, capsicum is the chemical that makes hot peppers hot.

At our house, I remember mom taking out an ancient, electric two-burner hotplate, plugging it in beside my bed, and bringing a pot of water to a boil. To that water, she added a small quantity of Friar’s Balsam and let the pleasant-smelling steam clear my chest. Again, I asked Wikipedia about this remedy and it said, “Tincture of benzoin is a pungent solution of benzoin resin in ethanol. A similar preparation called Friar’s Balsam or Compound Benzoin Tincture contains, in addition, Cape aloes or Barbados aloes and storax resin. Friar’s balsam was invented by Joshua Ward around 1760.” I haven’t seen it on pharmacy shelves recently, but I do remember how it filled the whole house with a delightful fragrance. Steam from an ordinary pot of water may have had the same curing potential.

A sore throat could be helped by chewing Aspergum – an orange chicklet gum that contained aspirin. It’s no longer available. Alternatively, we could buy Smith Brothers Cough Drops with the pen-ink drawings of two heavily bearded brothers on the box. The legend of the first cough drop in America began in the Smith’s family-owned, small-batch candy store in 1847 and continued until 2015 when the new owners of the company went out of business.

I strive to be very diligent in my research, so I continued looking for suitable recipes for throat lozenges. I found this recipe in an 18th-century book, “Fortunes in Formulas for Home, Farm and Workshop” that once belonged to my father. “Take 191 grains of Catechu (and no, I have no idea what that is), 273 grains of Tannic Acid, 273 grains of Tartaric acid, 30 minims of Capsicum (there’s that hot pepper stuff again) and 7 ounces of Black Currant paste. Add refined sugar to taste and Mucilage of Acacia. Mix well to produce 7 pounds of lozenges”. Should you make this recipe, please don’t ask me to test the product.

Another recipe for a cough syrup came from the “Great 19th Century Medicine Manual by Grandma Nichols” first published in 1894. “Boil a tablespoonful of liquid tar in a quart of rain water, strain through a cheese cloth. Add a pound of horehound candy, a cup of sugar and a half spoonful of pulverized alum.” Ginger tea sounds easier to make.

Grandma Nichols also suggested another, but “kill or cure” cough remedy which advised making a tea from peach tree bark and adding nitro-hydro-chloric acid (her spelling) plus other ingredients. Fortunately, I have a basic scientific knowledge of the corrosive capabilities of hydrochloric acid, so I stopped reading after the line that warned one not to leave the spoon in the liquid. I wisely decided I would stick to ginger tea.

That’s my View from Over the Hill.

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