UCLA has an Online Archive of American Folk Medicine that is fun to play with, if you have some spare time and curiosity about how our ancestors used to treat common ailments. For example, if you search for “headache”, you can learn that in a 1935 publication, it was suggested that you could cure a headache by rubbing a stone on your forehead. This unusual (and probably quite unhelpful) solution was reported to be a Native American remedy. A collection of folklore from North Carolina suggested that putting a handful of salt on your head would cure a headache. Alabama … Continue reading →