Weird Western Maryland

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 patie...

In her 1902 article "Incantations and Popular Healing in Maryland and Pennsylvania," Baltimore writer Letitia Humphreys Wrenshall profiles a "most accomplished weaver of quilt pieces and spells" whom she repeatedly visited and interviewed in Western Maryland. Today, we might call her unnamed interviewee a "wise woman," a "traditional healer" or "folk doctor." Wrenshall neither names nor precisely locates this healer, but neighbors might well have recognized her, in the unlikely event they had perused The Journal of American Folk-Lore : She was a gentle, quiet-spoken woman, living in her own thick-walled stone house, very comfortably surrounded, and supplied by all that was yielded from a well-cared-for place of several acres. (268-269) Moreover, the woman "was pretty, rosy, and plump," and had been raised by an aunt "who had married a 'German man'" (270-271). It was this man who taught his not-quite-niece all...