Poor fishies. (joking)

If you ever get pneumonia, call me and I'll walk you through the treatment. You can be "out of the woods" within 24-36 hours.

Charlie
The Herbalist

That particular remedy sounded like a good thing to do when one really doesn't have anything that will really work handy, just to feel that one is doing something. IMO a certain percentage of the old remedies were really made up for that purpose, ie, psychological need, rather than a true medicinal approach. Another I read somewhere was, to treat epilepsy, to break an egg open and let ants eat the contents. (I suppose ants could have curative abilities they express in gratitude, though, who knows? I don't think anyone has really tried to actually commune with an ant colony regarding its feelings or intent.)

I suppose if someone were essentially starving they could eat the pastes and maybe at least give their immune systems a kickstart, since both contain protein.

:o/

I suppose if one were in an isolated area with no access to modern medicine it might be necessary to fall back on home remedies for pneumonia, but that is probably what killed so many so soon in the days before modern medicine.

Some illnesses are so severe, and move so rapidly, that traditional treatments do not have the strength to work. I have always considered pneumonia to be one of those. Essentially, the way I picture it, you have a concentrated ball of microorganisms rapidly doubling in quantity, and something has to be done to stop that fairly quickly before it kills you. Even today and hospitalized, many elderly still die of it.

Traditional herbal treatments often cannot be safely taken in massive doses because they have not been treated by modern processes to remove any non-therapeutic constituents that could be harmful.

There probably are remedies that could be taken to help ward off pneumonia, before a lung infection actually developed to the point it could be called that, but I don't know what they would be.

I know the buds of forsythia have some antibiotic quality, but the Chinese grow a special strain in which that characteristic is stronger. There would be no guarantee, in either case, though, that the antibiotic quality of the forsythia buds would kill the harmful bacteria, rather than simply kill off more beneficial ones that might help to keep more lethal bacteria strains at bay. Only a practitioner in the area where the infection was occurring who had practiced on others with the same condition would tend to have this knowledge.

Herbal treatment was probably by trial and error in the early days, and later patients probably benefited more than earlier ones during any particular epidemic. My theory is that most epidemics begin in more crowded and less affluent conditions, which would enable the ambitious practitioner to exercise his or her best remedies on the more affluent.

Since herbs take more space to grow and store than today's pills, and transportation was also more limited, the average herbalist was probably rather limited in the number of remedies actually on hand. There were probably a few standards (like comfrey, because it grows so large and well in a variety of circumstances) which would be tried for almost every malady, since there was such a good supply of it, and other herbal remedies, which might acutually have been more effective, held in reserve for the very worst cases or the wealthiest clients.

Herbs from warmer, or cooler, or dryer, or more humid climates than the practicing herbalist's would have been in short supply in the early days.

An herbalist that relocated to an area with a different climate, for any reason, would have initially been able to bring a supply of his or her own remedies along, but would soon have needed to resupply with remedies that could grow in the new area, or which were obtainable through reliable trade with other areas. Even for conditions which the herbalist knew how to treat effectively, many probably died because of insufficient supplies of herbs or lack of anything to pay for treatment.

All of that, again, would have resulted in those who had the knowledge and resources to do so, growing or gathering their own herbs where possible. It is possible that monks and nuns might have shared clones of valuable plants with parish priests, who then could pass offsets on to parishioners, but I don't know if anyone has documentation of that. Possibly, on pilgrimages, people also were on the lookout for curative plants that could be brought home.