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86 pages

English

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An in-depth study of traditional folk medicine in Vermont, written by a formally trained doctor.

Folk medicine is an imperative aspect of many Vermonters’ lives and health. Trained medical doctor D. C. Jarvis set out to investigate this traditional approach to herbal medicine and produced this little guide to provide knowledge and understanding of the nature and long-successful uses of folk medicine. An invaluable read for anyone interested in daily increased vitality.

The chapters featured in this volume include:

- Vermont Environment and the Life Span

- The Animal Laws

- Your Beginning

- Your Racial Pattern and Vermont Folk Medicine

- The First Yardstick of Your Health

- The Instincts of Childhood

- Potassium and Its Uses

- The Usefulness of Honey

- The Usefulness of Kelp

- The Importance of Iodine

- Castor Oil and Corn Oil

- Medical Reasoning Behind Vermont Folk Medicine

Sujets

Santé et bien-être

Santé du quotidien

Herbal Medications

Health

Fitness

Informations

Publié par	Read Books Ltd.
Date de parution	31 mai 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781473385504
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	4 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Folk Medicine
by D. C. Jarvis, M.D.
Foreword
I am a fifth-generation Vermonter on my mother’s side. My medical-college and internship days in Burlington trained me in organized medicine. When I located in Barre, to pursue my chosen specialty of eye, ear, nose and throat, I recognized another type of medicine which I had to know and understand if I was to gain the medical confidence and respect of my fellow Vermonters who lived close to the soil on back-road farms. This medicine—Vermont folk medicine—had not been part of my formal training, but it is deeply a part of Vermont living. I set about learning it and understanding its origins.
My studies led me to considerable readjustment of orthodox approaches. For example, it did not immediately make medical sense to me that a sore throat could be cured in one day by chewing fresh gum of the spruce tree. But I saw that I would be wise to learn the principles of this folk medicine and cultivate a willingness to prescribe its time-honored remedies where precedent indicated that they would be as, or more, efficacious than the remedies which organized medicine had taught me to use.
When I discussed a variety of specific treatments of this indigenous medicine with my colleagues at regional and national medical-society meetings, they asked me to continue the discussion at greater length by starting a correspondence study group, basing letters on my cumulative findings. I carried on this correspondence for twenty years. Membership was limited to fifty persons. Practically all were nationally known; many were faculty members of medical schools. The letters went out Tuesdays and Fridays to a mailing list in thirty-two states.
I conceived this book originally to pass on to my daughter and her descendants the principles and workings of this folk medicine as tested in the course of my practice. Later I decided to expand it. My wish for it is that it may bring knowledge and understanding of the nature and long-successful uses of folk medicine to anyone interested in daily increased vitality from childhood through maturity to satisfyingly active old age.
I believe that the doctor of the future will be a teacher as well as physician. His real job will be to teach people how to be healthy. Doctors will be even busier than they are now because it is a lot harder to keep people well than it is to just get them over a sickness.
Vermont folk medicine has much to give those who reject as inevitable the specter of physical impairment and weakening, and who prefer instead to plan to be strong, active, and free from disease to the very end of their days.
D. C. J ARVIS
Contents
Foreword
1 Definitions
2 Vermont Environment and the Life Span
3 The Animal Laws
4 Your Beginning
5 Your Racial Pattern and Vermont Folk Medicine
6 The First Yardstick of Your Health
7 The Instincts of Childhood
8 Potassium and Its Uses
9 The Usefulness of Honey
10 The Usefulness of Kelp
11 The Importance of Iodine
12 Castor Oil and Corn Oil
13 Medical Reasoning Behind Vermont Folk Medicine
Appendices
A. Further Studies Made on Animals
B. Some Other Uses of Apple Cider in Vermont Folk Medicine
C. Vermont Folk Medicine and Beverages
D. Chemical Analysis of Kelp
E. Harmful Bacteria and Alkalinity
1
Definitions
Folk medicine reaches very far back in time. Nature opened the first drugstore. Primitive man and the animals depended on preventive use of its stock of plants and herbs to avoid disease and to maintain health and vigor. Because man and the animals were constantly on the move, Nature’s drugstore had branches everywhere. Wherever in the world you were sick, you would find in the fields its medicines to cure you, its materials for curative herbal teas and ointments.
Vermont folk medicine has been unfolding in the Ver - (green) mont (mountains) since aboriginal times. It adapts very old physiological and biochemical laws to the maintenance of health and vigor in the environmental conditions of Vermont living. But there is no geographical limit on the laws, and their applications will work well in many environments.
As with all folk medicine from time immemorial, the ideal of Vermont folk medicine is to condition the body in its entirety so that disease will not attack it. Now and then one finds people taking it for granted that “folk medicine” is a vague term for a collection of medical old wives’ tales. It is inevitable that some myths would creep in along the way. For example, when I was a child, a string of Job’s Tears—a species of grass having round, shiny grains imaginatively said to resemble the patient tears of the sorely tried Old Testament character—frequently were hung by a mother around the neck of her child “to help him cut his teeth.” And of course all of us have heard of the supposedly magical, if smelly, powers of a little sack of asafoetida—the gum-resin substance with the garlicky odor—which, worn around the neck through the cold winter months, would surely repel sickness. In considering folk medicine, obviously witch-doctor myths should be separated from the genuine article.
Our pioneer ancestors discovered the rudiments of their folk medicine in the healing plants sought out by animals suffering from alimentary disturbances, fever, and wounds. By observing how animals cure themselves from disease, they learned how to keep themselves healthy by Nature’s own methods.
I have come to marvel at the instinct of animals to make use of natural laws for healing themselves. They know unerringly which herbs will cure what ills. Wild creatures first seek solitude and absolute relaxation, then they rely on the complete remedies of Nature—the medicine in plants and pure air. A bear grubbing for fern roots; a wild turkey compelling her babies in a rainy spell to eat leaves of the spice bush; an animal, bitten by a poisonous snake, confidently chewing snakeroot—all these are typical examples. An animal with fever quickly hunts up an airy, shady place near water, there remaining quiet, eating nothing but drinking often until its health is recovered. On the other hand, an animal bedeviled by rheumatism finds a spot of hot sunlight and lies in it until the misery bakes out.
In Vermont, accepting Nature’s well-worked-out plan for good health and freedom from disease as observed in animals, people simply follow the plan, not trying continually to revise it in accordance with some whim of their own. Thus they carry over into adult life instincts and habits from their childhood.
The body needs assistance to meet the complications, stresses and strains of modern civilization. Mercifully during childhood we are more or less protected by instincts. But when we leave the world of childhood, we are all too prone to consider these instincts old-fashioned. Happily it is never too late to relearn them, if we are willing to observe the way Nature’s laws are followed by animals and by little children.
If you care to go to school to the bees, the fowl, the cats, dogs, goats, mink, calves, dairy cows, bulls, and horses, and allow them to teach you their ways, as have generations of Vermonters living by the prescriptions of Vermont folk medicine, you will gain insight into a physiological and biochemical medicine not to be learned from medical books. Verified through observing results in animals, this medicine, which has passed from generation to generation by word of mouth, enables great numbers of Vermonters to continue carrying heavy daily work loads and to go on well past the Scriptural three-score-and-ten years with good physical and mental vigor, good digestion, good eyesight, and good hearing, avoiding senility to the very end.
Having defined the broad nature of folk medicine and specified the Vermont version of it, this book proposes to discuss it in a light which will enable any reader to better understand problems of the body in relation to living. This is done with the hope that rough places in your life pathway may be made smoother, and you may come into the latter years with a still-efficient human machine, represented by your body.
2
Vermont Environment and the Life Span
Vermont folk medicine has evolved out of a blend of Nature’s preventive and curative principles, common sense, and the hard fact that Vermont is climatically one of the most unstable areas in the world.
In our latitude the prevailing winds are westerly. Of the twenty-six storm tracks crossing the United States on their way to the Atlantic Ocean, twenty-three pass over Vermont. Consequently Vermont weather changes every few days the year round, and the Vermonter faces the major biological necessity of constantly adjusting his body to rapidly alternating heat and cold, high and low barometric pressure, and seasonal changes of humidity and air ionization. Every such adjustment to climate must be made by a change in the blood circulation. One day the skin is called upon to be a radiator, giving off heat. The next day it may have to be an insulator, retaining the body heat. This puts great strain on the heart and blood vessels.
According to American Heart Association statistics, Vermont has a good deal of heart disease directly attributable to climatic instability. Vermont folk medicine includes ways to aid the heart, the blood vessels, and the blood supply, so that heart attacks may be avoided, the heart will not wear out as quickly, and its life may be prolonged.
Your heart is the motor of your human machine. The body muscles, including that muscle which is the heart, work on sugar. The researchers of our folk medicine, noting effects of environment, food, and variations in food on animals and humans, show that it makes a great difference to your heart whether you give it the natural sugar which is found in honey, or refined white sugar. You can be kind to your heart by giving it honey on which to do its work.
When working normally your heart is capable of pumping six ounces of blood per he