You probably don’t want to come over to my house this week. Several of my kids have runny noses and coughs; the baby looks especially miserable. We are treating their colds with extra naps, chicken soup, tea with honey, and foods high in Vitamin C (red peppers, clementines, broccoli). I couldn’t help but wonder, what are some of the most interesting treaments for colds throughout history?

Ancient China

For 3000 years the plant ma huong has been made into tea in China. (It is now known to contain the decongestant pseudoephedrine.)

Ancient Greece

Hippocrates, the “Father of Medicine,” believed the body must be kept in balance between the four humours: blood, phlegm, black and yellow bile. He thought colds were due to a build up of waste matter in the brain. One of his treatments was the mustard plaster, a mixture of ground mustard seeds, flour, and water, wrapped in cloth and applied to the chest. (Mustard plasters were subsequently used for centuries all around the world.)

Ancient Rome

As early as 60 A.D. chicken soup was praised for its healing properties by a Roman surgeon named Pedacius Dioscorides. (It is now known to contain the amino acid cysteine which acts as a mild decongestant.)

In his book Natural History Pliny the Elder (d. 79 AD) notes several folk medicine cures for cold symptoms, including wolf liver in mulled wine, stewed frog legs, horse saliva, and honey.

Middle Ages

During the medieval period getting the body’s humours back into balance was still thought to be the way to cure illness. If you were too cold (too much phlegm), you should eat hot and fried foods (also mustard, horseradish, and liquorice); if you were too cold (excess blood) drawing blood with a leech was common.

The 12th century physician Moses Maimonides called chicken soup “an excellent food as well as medication.”

Italian physician Taddeo Alderotti (d. 1295) described a cure made by concentrating red wine (similar to how brandy is made).

Renaissance

In Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes (1597) by English botanist John Gerard (apparently largely plagiarized from Rembert Dodoens’s 1554 book) burning juniper gum is a suggested remedy for cold symptoms.

18th Century

In Domestic Medicine (1722), William Buchan wrote, “Go to bed, hang your hat on the foot of the bed and continue to drink until you can see two hats.” (!)

In Primitive Physic, Or, An Easy and Natural Way of Curing Most Diseases (1761), John Wesley suggested a cold medicine that included salt water, sugar syrup, oil, and “the paregoric elixir of the Edinburgh dispensatory” (essentially a mixture of camphor and opium).

19th Century

In The Book of Household Management (1861) Mrs. Isabella Beeton makes several recommendations for curing a cold, including placing a flannel blanket dipped in boiling water and sprinkled with turpentine on your chest, and drinking a decoction of rum, linseed, raisin, and liquorice.

In Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cures (1897), William Thomas Fernie recommends a tincture of white bryony for coughs and colds — but it’s actually poisonous.

Any of these remedies you’d care to try? 🙂

Sources

• “5 ways people used to cure a cold — and some are still used today!” via CBC Kids
• “9 Historical Cold ‘Cures’ That You Won’t Believe People Actually Used” by JR Thorpe via Bustle
• “7 Old-Fashioned Remedies for the Common Cold” by Sarah Dobbs via Mental Floss
• “Common cold: The centuries-old battle against the sniffles” by Jon Kelly via BBC News