My father was also obsessed with the common cold. According to him, colds were dangerous: an untreated cold could turn into pneumonia and you could die. It was unthinkable to let a cold go untreated. I don't know how widespread this attitude was. It seems most people nowadays consider a cold just an inconvenience to be endured for a few days.

Here my memory gets kind of hazy. I can't remember how he matched up treatments with symptoms. Some of the treatments he used were:

• A spoonful of turpentine, with sugar added to make it more palatable.

• Gargling with salt water.

• Vicks Vaporub, sometimes rubbed on your chest, sometimes stuck up your nose, sometimes letting a little dab of it melt on your tongue.

• Vaseline was sometimes used instead of Vicks Vaporub.

• And of course, there were the laxatives.

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Once when I was stung on the arm by a wasp, my dad put tobacco juice on it. This happened while we were visiting my uncle's farm. My dad wasn't a tobacco user then, so he asked my uncle for some chewing tobacco, which he then chewed and put on my arm. By the time he did this, it had already stopped hurting, so I don't know why he bothered.