Another of Grannie's Remedies suggested for the prevention of colds goes like this: "Walk with the toes turned outward. Walk with the chin slightly above the horizontal line, as if looking at the top of a man's hat in front of you, or at the eaves or roof of a house. Walk a good deal with your hands behind you. Sit with the lower part of your spine pressed against the chair back."
A look through history provides a representative sampling of popular folk remedies for colds:
From an article by Tim Clark
A Vermont doctor prescribed chewing on a honeycomb to clear sinus passages. Another Vermonter, Dr. B. J. Kendall, suggested the following treatment in a pamphlet called The Doctor at Home Illustrated: Treating the Diseases of Man and the Horse (1888): "Take of molasses one-half cupful, Jamaica ginger one heaping teaspoonful, soda or saleratus one-fourth teaspoonful. Mix and beat thoroughly. Dose, one teaspoonful, repeated every hour."
Onions figure in many cold cures from the early days in this country. A mixture of onions and butter was placed on the throat and chest. Cooked onions were put in a muslin bag and worn around the neck. To protect children, it was agreed that a large red onion should be tied around the bedpost.
People have suggested washing out the nose with hot water, soap, sodium bicarbonate, ammonium bicarbonate, cod-liver oil, cream, salt water, vapors of ammonia, eucalyptus oil, iodine, and formalin. Sniffing aspirin, pepper, snuff, and cinnamon have been tried. Some colonial Americans pared orange peels, rolled them up inside out, and stuffed them into the nostrils.
Inventor Norman Lake of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, discovered in 1953 that he could make a cold go away by wearing a clothespin on his nose. In 1977, after much research, he patented a device he called the Cold Clip, which closed the nose to viruses or pollen. Despite tests by a local physician showing that half of the volunteers who used the Cold Clip were able to halt or shorten the duration of colds, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) told Lake that he could not advertise his device as a cold cure but only as a way of "keeping foreign material out of the nose."
According to Grannie's Remedies by Mai Thomas (1965), "In some country districts (in England) there are still many folk who believe that swallowing a spider will cure them." Another of Grannie's Remedies suggested for the prevention of colds goes like this: "Walk with the toes turned outward. Walk with the chin slightly above the horizontal line, as if looking at the top of a man's hat in front of you, or at the eaves or roof of a house. Walk a good deal with your hands behind you. Sit with the lower part of your spine pressed against the chair back."
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