My dad was the one who always pushed folk medicine on me when I was a kid. I remember once he told me, in all apparent seriousness, that he was a doctor. It was total bullshit, of course, but he expected me to believe it. I didn't. It was totally obvious to me that (1) he was too poorly educated to be a doctor (He couldn't spell worth shit, or do simple math.), and (2) if he was a real doctor, he wouldn't be working as a janitor.

Why do parents think they can get away with telling such ridiculous lies to kids, without losing all their respect and trust? I guess that's a subject for another thread.

Most of the time it was laxative of one kind or another. Fletcher's Castoria when I was little, and later, Milk of Magnesia.

Years later I was going through a trunk in the basement and I found a pamphlet about digestion written by a doctor. The doctor said he had examined hundreds of cadavers and determined that 9 out of 10 of them were constipated! Ergo, constipation must have been the cause of death! No doubt this was where my dad got his ideas. I think the pamphlet must have been written in the 1920s.

The theory was: if shit stays in your body too long, it breeds germs, which then infect your whole body. And since any disease can be caused by germs (he thought), and the most likely source of germs is shit, then it makes sense to treat any disease with a laxative, right? Well, that's what he did.

He said it was important to keep "reg'lar." He was proud that he had a bowel movement every day, and he thought everybody should. If a day went by and he didn't have one, he would take a laxative himself. You can't say he didn't practice what he preached.

If he sensed that I was out of sorts for any reason, such as just being mopey, hanging around the house too much, and watching too much TV, he would ask me "How's yer bowels?" (He pronounced "bowels" to rhyme with "pals.") If I couldn't give him a satisfactory answer, he would insist I take a laxative. (I can't remember exactly what he considered satisfactory.)

Then there was the dosage problem. Apparently he didn't believe that dosages should be scaled down for kids. I think he gave me the same amount he took himself, maybe more, for good measure, since he didn't know but what I had been constipated for several days. And he probably had built up some resistance, having taken laxatives so often himself. So the laxatives he gave me often caused explosive diarrhea. I remember my mother, who had to clean up after me, shouting: "You gave him too much!"

In time I learned that if I felt the slightest bit ill, I had better not let my father find out about it, because the cure was worse than the disease.