Five days before leaving Ekaterinburg I caught the tail end of a flu epidemic that, some weeks ago, led to several school closings due to quarantine. Fortunately, I’m done with all the archives, and all the most important library stuff – although I was planning to comb the card catalog for the last stray memoirs. The process, incidentally, is wonderful – I go through the alphabetical catalog in the “regional studies” section of the library (since other stuff can likely be found in the States, and definitely in Moscow) and pick out all the white cards. The library started using them in 1999. Coincidentally, engineers did not really publish memoirs in the 1990s but started doing in the 2000s. I love using the catalog in the way it was not meant to be used!
But anyway. Flu. I talked to mom yesterday, and she gave me the usual motherly advice: drink lots of fluids, eat lemons for vitamin C, don’t go to the library, stay in bed, warm milk with honey and baking soda for sore throat. The baking soda thing was new (Canadian, maybe?), and it got me thinking about folk medicine. Cold and flu are perfect objects for it – everyone gets them, they rarely kill you, and nothing you can do actually speeds up recovery, time after time. So, they encourage medical experimentation, with results that follow cultural and historical boundaries. Since I’m not fit for any actual work and mom’s forbidden me to go to the library, let’s play. I’ll tell you about Russian ways of dealing with common cold, and you, my three faithful readers with wonderfully multicultural experiences, will tell me yours.
Fever: aside from the obvious and common-sensical (rubbing alcohol), fever is treated with tea and raspberry preserves. Quite delightful – it probably doesn’t help, but it does make one feel better. My grandmother saved raspberry preserves specifically for when someone in the family was sick, which also made it a special occasion.
Sore throat: warm milk and honey. Has a disgusting variant – onions boiled in milk, also supposed to be drunk warm. Onions feature in another treatment procedure: chop them fine and breath over them. The fumes supposedly kill germs – or at least make them cry. Ice cream, or anything cold, are supposed to be Really Bad for sore throat.
Stuffed nose: breathing over chopped onions is supposed to help that, too. If things were really bad, grandma would boil a pot of potatoes and had me breathe potato steam, my head covered with a towel.
General care: lots of tea (Russians are not in the habit of drinking water or herbal teas, so this is just a variant of “lots of liquids”). Bed. Minimal contact with water (I would even be relieved from my dishwashing duties).
I’m actually curious about the “bed” thing, because I absolutely cannot do it unless really feverish. Does it actually help? Or is it a remnant of our peasant past when a person was either in bed or ploughing a field?
OK, your turn.
4 Comments
March 26, 2007 at 12:11 am
Sorry, what exactly is the rubbing alcohol for?
I’m not sure this is an actual Colombian remedy, but the first time I visited Bogotá my gringo host steered more toward this special kind of honey. It is apparently what the bees use to disinfect the hives. It is dark, has a unique flavor. You take a couple spoonfulls as you start to the pre-cold sore throat, to let it coat the back of your throat and kill whatever nasties there lurk. I figure it can’t hurt.
My back-in-the-States recipe for colds is a Ricola cough drop dissolved in a mug of hot water. Stir, then breathe the vapors as the water becomes cool enough to drink.
Feel better soon!
ps – Just downloaded the new Google Earth. Can you post the coordinates of your apartment and the archive, or orient us from major landmarks?
March 29, 2007 at 12:45 am
My grandparents treated sore throats with whisky and honey. Scots, you know. The ice cream being bad for sore throats makes sense to me, in the context of dairy promoting the production of phlegm — but that would also make milk bad, wouldn’t it? And I personally think nothing’s better than a popcicle for a sore throat.
Loki’s family, naturally, goes for chicken noodle or matzo soup….
March 30, 2007 at 8:40 am
My ex-boyfriend Lev, a Russian kid, was also really into milk with honey when he got sick. I remember concocting it in the dining hall. But it also just tastes good
I had a case recently where there was tremendous disagreement between a woman’s husband and her mother how to treat her for smallpox. The husband was all into science (French doctors, bleeding her under the tongue, apothecaries…) and the mother favored chicken soup and a cunning woman. I wonder which was better… The poor woman never fully recovered the use of her limbs or tongue, and there was a question whether her subsequent confession to incest was the real thing or whether she had lost her wits.
April 3, 2007 at 4:58 am
Eleanor, thanks for the great story! Even the staunchest of Russian grandmothers can hardly match this =)
Kentuckienne, the badness of ice cream has nothing to do with milk, it has everything to do with cold. Russians are deadly afraid of cold. My grandma personally examined my throat every time I asked for ice cream, and more than half the time the verdict was negative. And sometimes she agreed, but only if I ate the ice cream melted. Out of a soup bowl.
Rob, the archive is 17 Bolshaya Pirogovskaya street, in Moscow. The apartment is in one of a thousand identical high-rises, so not very interesting…