Browse:Black Root (Volume 1, entries 1124)
Black Root
Volume 1, entries 1124. Source context: THE DOCTORS AT WORK: REPORTS FROM LAYMEN → FOLK MEDICINE → CURE AND PROTECTION. Entries listed under this heading in the source volume.
Entries
Entry 1124
My father was sick and we had the doctor come attend him and the doctor tended him and he couldn't diagnose his case. So we changed doctors and the [second] doctor waited on him about two weeks or more. He didn't seem to do any good and we changed to another [third] doctor. And we got him and he said, "Well, I don't see I kin do any good for him, becuz I think he's poisoned." [Would a Doctor of Medicine say this? See my comments in Introduction.] So a ole lady told me to go an' see a ole man by the name of Simmons. And I went and got a ole man by the name of Simmons and he came there and he talked to my father and he told me, he said, "Come on boy and go in the woods with me." And he got some whut they call blackroot - that's a weed that grows in the woods, a round root, right black, something like a little potato - and red oak bark. [For oak, see No. 1060, p.402, also margin-title OAK later, and Index. Black- root is a name for a number of plants, the present one probably being Chaenolobus undulatus, indigenous to Southern U. S. A., and having black tuberlike rootstocks.] And he sent me to the drug store while he's boilin' them to get him five cents Worth of bluestone and alum mixed. And he boil that and he made a tea out of that and he strained it, let it cook and he told him to take two swallahs of it three times a day. And the first swallahs - the first two swallahs - that my father taken of it he vomit somepin jis' as green as grass [a usual expression for vomit caused by inside cunjuration]. Then he got kin'a relief on the nex dose he taken. He didn't vomit. But on the third one he vomit again. Then [this third time] he vomit up somepin there - it look somepin like jelly. Then he commence to gettin' a little better and finally he kept on takin' it until he did get so he could get out.