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 patie...