I was at the drugstore yesterday. There are signs both outside the store and in exhorting me to get my flu shot. Those signs are just another way of saying, "September is here."
When we were kids in the sniffle season our frontline medical provider was not a nurse or a doctor, but Aunt Marge. She had a particular remedy for sore throats. I can attest to its efficacy, though, perhaps, not to its safety, given that the product she used was removed from circulation near the close of the last century. I wrote the piece, from which the one below is adapted, back in September of 2015, not long before my Aunt Marge died. I miss her. And, when sore throat season comes to me, I will wish I could go to her house again and, again, come home cured.
Just as summer fades, flu season begins.
I’m wishing my Aunt Marge were still able to swab my throat.
Throat swabbing — as done by Aunt Marge — was the fall/winter remedy of choice for my father’s family. My mother’s family leaned more towards Vicks VapoRub and head rags. The head rags were worn to protect against “the night air,” which, my Curry grandmother believed, attacked the bare head and led to neuralgia. But, we reasoned, she spent her early years in a dug-out on the Texas plains where the night air may, in fact, have been filled with dangers against which protections of all sort were necessary. In addition, my Mother Curry was in her forties when she got indoor plumbing and still preferred a slop jar kept under the bed for nightly necessities, so we tended to ignore her medical advice on nocturnal threats. We ignored her medical advice, but we learned and still use her description of a person with a wide smile on his face. He has, we say, “a grin as big as the wave on a slop bucket.”
The paternal family remedy was proven. It involved a trip to our aunt’s house, where she would lead the patient to the front bedroom and have him or her lie down on the bed, face up, head dangling off the edge. Often a couple of cousins and maybe a neighbor child or two would be in the room at once, the bed lined with bodies and drooping heads. Maybe it was the steady rush of blood to the brain that healed, but my aunt kept faith in the medicinal powers of Mercurochrome.
Aunt Marge used a long cotton-tipped stick to soak up the Mercurochrome. After cautioning us to lie still and stop gagging, she pushed a sodden swab far down into each throat, painting the often pus-marked walls a bright, medicinal red. No one could resist gagging or making a strangled sound of disgust at the taste, but we all remember feeling better — our throats soothed, our sinuses opened — after a turn in the front room of the Dawson house. If it hurt to swallow when we walked in, after a throat swabbing the pain was gone.
Sometimes multiple swabbings were needed. Our mother judged whether we needed a repeat visit, but I can remember asking to go, wanting the relief her treatment offered. And I remember going to Tulia as an adult, hoping to add a coat of Mercurochrome paint to the visit.
Both neuralgia and Mercurochrome are gone now. Neuralgia, the kind of vague headache and malaise brought on by exposure to “the night air,” has been swallowed up in diagnostic specificity regarding the irritation of nerves in the head and face. Apparently an open window and a bare head have nothing to do with the trigeminal nerve.
Mercurochrome fell to the Food and Drug Administration in 1998, when the feds declared it “not generally recognized as safe and effective,” even as they acknowledged that a noticeable number of people hadn’t been killed — or, let’s be fair, reported killed — by Mercurochrome. Turns out the throat paint contained mercury. (And, chrome, too? Who knows?) So that delicious sense of relief? It was probably just mercury toxicity with a hint of '57 Ford front fender.
Aunt Marge was not contacted for the study.
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