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 | | This was not me when I was sick. This is green person when they are sick. |
About 7 days ago (or one week, or 168 hours, or 10,080 minutes, or 604,800 seconds) I was coming down with an illness. This illness is commonly referred to as "the common cold", but there is nothing common about the common cold. It's not everyday that you wake up not being able to breathe from your nose, or waking up to a headache that makes you wonder if aliens hit you in the head during your sleep, and continued to perform weird tests on your unconscious body while you were... well, unconscious. The last time that I can remember waking up to something like that was the other day when Sammy Fats was cooking something fierce in the kitchen and he didn't cook it right, smelling up the entire place. No wait, more like in the spring when I contracted this pesky common cold prior to this one. What a stupid immune system, you would think that it would learn from one mistake, but it makes one mistake, and then goes ahead and makes another. If I had it my way, I would rip this immune system out, and put a much better one in place of it. This way I would no longer have to put up with the same colds over and over again. And no, I don't have Aids!
Later that night after the damage had already been done from the uncommon common cold, I went ahead and took a trip over to CVS to purchase some medication for this uncommon "common cold". So many medications to choose from, so many flavors of cough drops to ease coughing to pick from. It's no wonder kids have such hard times taking medication, they don't know what the hell they want. Cherry, Grape, Banana, Glue, you name it they got it. Glue... what the hell.
 | | Wow! Look at all that medication and shelf space! I wonder if they have Viagra! |
As I was standing there looking for the right medication that would suit my needs, I realized that humans didn't always have such medications to ease their suffering as we do nowadays. Back then, when you were sick, you were sick. Parents didn't dare send their kids to school sick unlike today's standards, they knew all too well that doing so may cause their child to simply burst into flames and infect other children around him or her, causing them to burst into flames and infecting all others around them. And so on and so forth. It was simply "too bad" when you were sick, say, oh, 45 years ago. Cough medicine was just starting to hit the shelves then, and it either didn't work, tasted really bad, or didn't work, so there was no relief in getting any of that.
This caused many weird remedies to pop up. Got bad luck with women? Sleep with a sack of potatoes. Got a head ache? Swim upside down in boiling water for 30 seconds. Back ache? No problem! Rub two stick together until you get fire. I don't see how any of these could even work, or how the hell people would even try these things to begin with, but I'm sure some people did them, and I'm sure they worked, too. Yea... "By accident". I haven't even skimmed the surface of all the stupid remedies that people came up with "back in the day", some of which you'll ask yourself, "Why the hell would you do that?!". It's not just from the 50s and 60s, we've got some weird and freaky remedies from the Native Americans here in... America, as well as natives from other countries. It doesn't matter what country, they're all weird, and they're all stupid. Diarrhea
Diarrhea sure doesn't seem too bad now, but back then you used to be able to crap yourself to death. Ok, that might be a bit of an understatement of it not being that bad now, it still is, but at least we understand it more now. Back in the days when Imodium wasn't around, people had to find ways to stop this from happening. In Israel they came up with the idea of swallowing Matzo Balls whole in hopes that they would plug up the "leak" and stop "it" from oozing out. After about 400 years of no good results they finally got the idea to stop and realized that it was not worth choking to death over, or really plugging something up and causing great pain when they didn't have any tools to help move the obstacle along because it really didn't work anyway. They figured that the matzo balls would be better off in soup where they belong in the first place.
 | | The higher you are, the more chance you have of living and the gods liking you! |
Voices
In today's times, if someone says that they "hear voices in their head", they're not going to be able to talk to you too much longer because they'll be locked up in a nut house for a few years and given more drugs than a walrus can withstand to make sure that those pesky voices don't bother them again for the duration of their stay. However, back in the day when they didn't have nut houses and weird medication to give to demented people, they had to come up with other ideas as to what was causing these voices inside of people's heads. Many Native Indians from the western half of the United States came up with the idea that these voices were voices of evil spirits that entered the body from a battle wound. In order to cleanse the body of all evil spirits, they would cut open the "infected" person and reach for his or her heart and rip it right out of the body, hold it high up in the air while chanting something like "waa waa waa!" and then placing it back in the body in hopes to have fixed the problem. If the person didn't get up from the table, the gods could not have saved them, and let them die a painless death, and if they woke up from the table the gods were merciful to them and cleansed their body of evil spirits and let them have another chance. Not many people were ever cleansed by the gods, however. The Indians just thought that none of their people were worthy, but of course we know that if you don't have a heart, you're going to die shortly.
 | | You have no idea how much better he would look with that cut off. |
Acne
Many teens still fear acme to this day. You know, that pesky condition that makes your face look like a pizza for months on end. At least now kids have Stridex to help ease the pimples and god knows what else grows on their faces, but back in the old days people just didn't have that. They knew the basic concepts of how pimples formed - excessive grease would cause the pimples to grow. So they simply thought of something dry that would absorb liquid. Salt was the first thing that came to their minds. Salt really didn't do anything, and they just wound up wasting tons of salt on something that didn't work. They could have used all that salt for preserving meat, or flavoring meat. A few years later some brilliant teen got the idea to take a knife and cut off his face in attempt to grow a new layer of skin back that would like a million times better. If you've ever seen the movie "Face Off", you'll know what I mean by that. Well, since the kid didn't have all that fancy technology, he wound up really butchering his face and it ending up a million times worse than it was before. Thank goodness this was in the 70s so people had enough common sense to smoke their weed instead of cutting their face up just to not have pimples anymore. I sometimes wonder how some of these people get up in the morning and remember how the breathe, this is yet another one of those moments where I wonder that. How stupid can you be to cut off your face because you have pimples? How stupid can you be to rip out someone's heart in hopes of curing them? Right, I forgot, I made all of that up. That's right, it's all not true. Well, it might be true, and I just don't know about it. Either way, if you think that any of them were true you've probably had to ask someone how to breathe within the past week or so.
At least the people back then have an excuse that they didn't know since they didn't have the knowledge that we have today. You, on the other hand, are a complete idiot if you think cutting off your face will heal acme, or sleeping with a sack of potatoes will give you better luck with women.
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