Folk medical inhalants in respiratory disorders.

SEVERAL years ago as I began to work through my voluminous files on American folk medicine, I became interested in some of the unusual remedies that have been employed to combat respiratory ailments in the United States and Canada. This interest was considerably heightened in 1964 when two Virginia scholars called attention to the use of grist mills in the treatment of whooping-cough in their own state and in the neighbouring state of West Virginia.' Their search was prompted by a Pennsylvania Dutch custom, dating from the 1880s, or before, of placing a child with whooping-cough in a hopper of grain in a grist mill until the grain was ground out. In the same year my research assistant and I made a preliminary survey of American folk medical prescriptions for the cure of respiratory ailments.2 On the basis of further study, I am now able to make a fuller statement. The survey is now being broadened to include material that has come to hand from the British Isles and from several countries of Europe. An eighteenth-century Scottish physician, William Buchan, writing on chin-cough, or whooping-cough, in 1772, said that 'the most effective remedy in this disease is a change of air. This often removes the malady even when the change seems to be from a purer to a less wholesome air .. . Part of this prescription was the recommendation that the patient should be removed some distance from the place where he contracted the disease. These views on a change of air were widely accepted and became, or were already a part of the folk medical treatment of whooping-cough in the British Isles.4 A change of air has not been reported for the treatment of whooping-coughs or hiccoughs in the folklore literature from Scandinavia, Germany, the Low Countries, and France, but this may be due to the failure to collect and report this popular folk medical custom. In Spain, for example, croup, a malady of the throat which affects breathing in children, is treated by sending the patient into the mountains for a change of air." Likewise, children were carried to Gowk Craig in Forgan Parish in Fife so they could recover from whooping-cough by remaining for two hours where the 'seven airs' blow, and in the North Riding of Yorkshire patients ordered to go to the country for a change of air were told to seek a spot 'where three roads meet.'6 Another famous high place to which people with respiratory disorders went was the viaduct, Archway Road, Highgate, in the northern part of London. Nurses formerly took children to this spot, and people are reported to have come to the bridge from far and wide with their children.7 Tan-Hill was a north country place to which people in Lancashire and Westmorland also took their children for relief from whoopingcough.8 That faith in high ground and a change of air was generally believed as