Formerly Enslaved African Americans Recall Health Care and Medicinal Treatments

Background: In the 1930s, interviewers working for the Federal Writers’ Project, a division of the Works Progress Administration, fanned the country to interview African American men and women who were formerly enslaved. Interviewers recorded the conversations using typewriters, pens and paper, and later edited the interview further before it was submitted to Writers’ Project offices. Thus, the interviews cannot be considered an accurate word-for-word account of what was said. Despite this, the interviews provide useful information about the lives, opinions, beliefs, and knowledge of people who survived slavery and lived to an advanced age. In the following interview excerpts, two women describe health-care practices and medicinal knowledge. In the first, an interviewer recorded the account of Rena Clark of Lafayette County, Mississippi, who was born in 1849 and worked as a midwife; the second documented the recollections of Julia “Aunt Sally” Brown of Jackson County, Georgia, who was born in 1852.

Rena Clark:

Rena says she has acted as a midwife ever since she was fifteen years old and has “done brought passel” of babies into this world. She says she has attended both white and colored for over fifty years. The first thing when a baby is born, Rena says, she would bathe and dress him and then she would tie a mole’s right foot around his neck. This was to keep him in good health and to bring him good luck. No conscientious “black mammy” would neglect this charm. When Rena’s babies begin teething, she always tied six small white buttons around their necks along with the mole’s foot. If this was done, a child would never feel any pain and would not know he was cutting teeth. If he should have colic, Rena’s remedy was a mixture of sugar and soot from the tenth brick in the chimney. Rena says when a baby is six months old, he ought to have the hives. If he failed to break out with them, the best thing to do would be to give him a dose of warm catnip tea. To keep away such diseases as measles, mumps, whooping cough, etc., Rena says she always tied on a little bag of asafetida, this also around his neck. On being asked if she didn’t think this was a good deal to tie around the neck of one baby, she said, “No, Ma’am, you’d better do dis dan let’em die without no ’tention.”
 

Julia “Aunt Sally” Brown: 

We used herbs in them days. When a body had dropsy, we’d set him in a tepid bath made of mullein leaves. There was jimson weed we’d use for rheumatism, and for asthma we’d use tea made of chestnut leaves. We’d sit the chestnut leaves, dry them in the sun just like any leaves, and we wouldn’t let them leaves get wet for nothin’ in the world while they was dryin’. We’d take poke-salad roots, boil them, and then take sugar and make a syrup. This was the best thing for asthma. It was known to cure it, too. For colds and such, we used horehound, made candy outen it with brown sugar. We used whiskey for colds, too. They had a remedy that they used for consumption—take dry cow manure, make a tea of this and flavor it with mint and give it to the sick person. We didn’t need many doctors then for we didn’t have so much sickness in them days, and naturally they didn’t die so fast; folks lived a long time then. They used a lot of peach-tree leaves, too, for fever, and when the stomach got upset we’d crush the leaves, pour water over them, and wouldn’t let them drink any other kind of water until they was better. Ah still believe in them ol’ home-made medicines, too, and Ah don’t believe in so many doctors.

Source:  Rena Clark (born 1849), Lafayette County, Mississippi, interviewed by Ruth Price. First Supplemental Series, Mississippi Narratives, volume 07Sm, p. 408.  Julia “Aunt Sally” Brown (born 1852), Jackson County, Georgia, interviewed by Geneva Tonsill, First Series, Library of Congress Rare Book Room Collection, Georgia Narratives, volume 12A, p. 141.