Whooping Cough? Find a Feminist!

Not so long ago, anti-vaxxers did not exist, because vaccines did not exist, and doctors and nurses were scarce in Western Maryland. Even the neighborhood healer or midwife might live across the mountain, hours away. Just about every family, therefore, had a go-to repository of home remedies. 

The first line of defense would have been the time-honored remedy, the one Grandma swore by. Some of these, we now know, actually worked, for sound scientific reasons. Some others did no harm, and may have done some good, thanks to the still-mysterious powers of the placebo effect, especially when the placebo was administered by loving hands. A few, sadly, did more harm than good.

And some were simply bizarre, like this Western Maryland remedy for whooping cough collected by Annie Weston Whitney and Caroline Canfield Bullock in their classic 1925 volume Folk-lore from Maryland. Today, this highly contagious respiratory ailment of childhood, so named because of the whooping sound made by patients fighting for air, is easily prevented by a vaccine. Imagine, by contrast, trying to follow these instructions:

A woman who has married without changing her name “has the power” to cure whooping cough. The child with the cough must go to her for a piece of bread-and-butter; and if she spreads the butter on the bread herself, and the child takes it without thanking her, “there will be no more ‘whoop’ to that cough.” (Maryland Mountains.) (Whitney and Bullock 83)

This is less a remedy than a ritual, a sample of hex magic, but it also seems terribly impractical, as married women who kept their birth surname circa 1925 must have been few and far between. Even a committed feminist brave enough to challenge local mores may have thought twice about the decision, if she didn't want a parade of croupy children on her doorstep.

Still, it's fascinating to see an example of a folk belief that could be seen as encouraging a married woman's independence while discouraging children from showing gratitude and respect to elders. One also admires that the charm doesn't promise too much. It just lessens the cough, making it whoop-less, rather than taking it away altogether.

Source:

Mayo Clinic. "Whooping Cough." 15 Oct. 2020. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/whooping-cough/symptoms-causes/syc-20378973. Accessed 30 Sept. 2021.

Whitney, Annie Weston, and Caroline Canfield Bullock. Folk-lore from Maryland. Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society Vol. 18. New York: American Folk-lore Society, 1925. Accessed online via the HathiTrust Digital Library, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/mb.

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