Appalachian History

Mountain woods and meadows are full of toys for any child with eyes to see. Skipping stones across a creek or running alongside a fence, stick in hand, clacking the fenceposts---these pastimes are available any time of year.

But the summer meadow has always held special treasures. Two of the best just happen to grow cheek by jowl: the clover, endless provider of necklaces white or red, and the English Plantain.

Before the advent of the manicured lawn, in which the plantain is an unwanted guest, mountaineers viewed this marvelous plant through very different eyes.

“Plantain is a vulnerary (a wound plant), and in everyday use it is excellent for relief of stings and bruises, and an alleviant for nettle stings,” says Bill Church in Medicinal Plants, Trees, & Shrubs of Appalachia - A Field Guide. “Traditionally, leaf tea used for coughs, diarrhea, dysentery, and blood urine. Leaves applied to blisters, sores, ulcers, swelling; also used for earaches and eye ailments; thought to reduce heat and pain of inflammation.”

In addition to its medicinal uses, English plantain (also known as buckhorn plantain) helped keep backwoods aviary inhabitants chirping; the seeds are often eaten by songbirds.

This common European perennial has been naturalized worldwide; Native Americans from Massachusetts first noticed it seemed to spring up wherever the Europeans settled in the New World, and the nickname “white man’s foot’ or “Englishman’s foot” has stuck ever since.

But back to plants kids can make toys from. The plantain’s botanical name is ‘plantago lanceolata,’ and that ‘lance’ part has a special attraction for mountain boys at play, who prefer to call it the ‘shooter plant.’

If you’re going to fire one of these little devils at your buddies, you’ve got to select carefully. Look for a seed head that has NOT blossomed yet! It should be tightly formed and look like a bullet (photo #1).

If the seed head is long and rangy, it just will not pop off the stem when you go to shoot it (photo #2). Select a stem long enough that you can break it into two halves about 8-9 inches apiece (photo #3).

Fold the stem piece without the seed head in half, and thread the other piece through it (photo #4). As you can see, it reminds one a bit of the bow & arrow, and that’s exactly the way to shoot the seed head off. You have to squeeze the folded piece together tight enough so that the seedhead doesn't simply pull through it.

This is one of those childhood arts, like whistling with two fingers under your tongue, or riding a bike, that you simply have to learn by trial & error. No amount of written instruction, diagrams, or photos can ever replace that.





















sources: Medicinal Plants, Trees, & Shrubs of Appalachia - A Field Guide, by Bill Church, Lulu.com, 2006
www.childrenstories.ca/Stories/Ribgrass-Or-Whitemans-foot.html



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Right up till the early years of the 20th century, a bite from a rabid animal could strike terror in the hearts of Appalachian residents. Rabies slowly destroys the nervous system. It finally attacks the spinal cord and its victim may froth at the mouth, scream and fight. Before Louis Pasteur developed a successful vaccination in 1885, death from rabies was a forgone conclusion, unless a madstone could be obtained. This trusted folk medicine gets its name from the delirious behavior caused by hydrophobia, a condition produced by the rabies virus.

"The mad-stone? People believe it will cure snakebites and hydrophobia," hunter Ben Lester told the authors of 'The Heart of the Alleghanies' in 1883. "Here's one. It was found in the paunch of a white deer I shot this fall was a year ago; and, mind you, the deer with a mad-stone in him is twice as hard to kill as one of ordinary kind. Five bullets were put in the buck that carried this one."

Ben Lester's madstone, "smooth and red, as large as a man's thumb, and with one flat, white side," was technically a calculus, a stone-like object sometimes found in the stomach of animals who chew their cud.

According to beliefs surrounding this folk medicine, a madstone from a brown deer will work in a bind if another cannot be found. A better grade of madstone comes from a white or spotted deer. The very best madstone comes from an albino or witch deer.

To treat someone bitten by a rabid animal you'd boil the madstone in sweet milk and then, while it was still hot, apply the stone to the wound, states Douglas Mahnkey in 'Hill and Holler Stories.'

"If the dog was actually mad, the stone stuck to the wound and would draw the 'pizen' out," he continues. "Once the stone was filled with the poison it would drop off, and it was again boiled in sweet milk and applied to the wound. The milk would turn green. This process was repeated until the stone no longer adhered to the wound."

Madstones have always been greatly prized by anyone fortunate enough to come into possession of one, and would be handed down in the same family for generations. Before Pasteur's immunization came to North Carolina in 1915, some owners charged up to $100 for lending a madstone, or required a $1,000 bond to guarantee its return.

And in North Georgia "Faith Cochran advertised his madstone every week in the county paper. People came from as far away as Alabama to be treated," according to Floyd C. Watkins and Charles Hubert Watkins in 'Yesterday in the Hills,' a portrait of farm life in Cherokee County at the turn of the twentieth century.

The Mad Stones of Vacherie [LA] featured in "Dixie Roto Magazine" June 19, 1949. The NC Museum of History has a madstone in its collection (no photo available, sorry!) whose catalog description reads: "Light brown trapezoidal stone; 'R.L. Steel/1829' scratched into 1 end of stone; '809' scratched into other end; small black leather pouch."

"It looked like a worn creek rock about the size of a partridge egg with a chip broken off one end. Faith dipped the stone in milk and stuck it to the wound. After it had sucked out the poison, it dropped off the wound."

Worn creek rock? What happened to white deer calculi? Dr. Thomas M. Owen, Director of the Department of Archives and History of the State of Alabama, in a letter dated September 22, 1917, wrote:

"Some of these stones are reputed to have been taken from the stomach of a deer, but they were in fact nothing more than native rock, worn smooth, and which, because of their porosity, were capable when heated of drawing out or absorbing liquids."

We know today that rabies is caused by a virus that is usually spread through contact with an infected animal's saliva. Whether madstones were made from deer stomach calculi or rock, was their ability to absorb quickly and efficiently the real issue, was it a chemical reaction (the tight bonding of the madstone to the wound and the milk), or some combination of both?


sources: www.nchealthandhealing.com/topic/33/
http://thelibrary.org/faq/files/momadstone.cfm
www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~okmurray/stories/mad_stone.htm
www.smokymountainnews.com/issues/02_06/02_01_06/mtn_voices.html
www.folkmed.ucla.edu/FMDetail.cfm?UID=22_4353
"Yesterday in the Hills," by Floyd C. Watkins, Charles Hubert Watkins, Quadrangle Books, 1963
"The Heart of the Alleghanies, or Western North Carolina," by Floyd C. Watkins, Calvin S. Brown, A. Williams & Co., 1883
"Hill and Holler Stories," by Douglas Mahnkey, S of D Press, School of the Ozarks, 1975



appalachian+folk+medicine madstones rabies Louis+Pasteur appalachia appalachian+history history+of+appalachia

People with an abnormally strong sex drive were said to suffer from white liver. The folk medicine record contains scant information on this folk illness, because openly talking about sex was taboo in the past. The earliest and most complete description of white liver comes from Vance Randolph's study of folk culture in the Ozarks: "When a lively, buxom, good-looking woman loses several husbands by death, it is often said that her inordinate passion has 'killed 'em off,' and she is referred to as a white-livered widder.

Usually it is only a figure of speech, but there are people who actually believe that a 'high nature' is correlated with white spots on the liver, and that this condition has often been revealed by post-mortem examination." A belief in North Carolina has it "that if a person married three times, his liver would automatically turn white," but no contextual information is provided.

A recent study by the author found that the term white liver was, and to a lesser extent still is, as Randolph observed, used as a figure of speech in Southern Appalachia to jokingly or disparagingly identify someone as sexually deviant, but for some the term also referred to a genuine sexual disorder.

Informants interviewed for the study described individuals with white liver as having an abnormally powerful sexual drive that incapacitates or kills a spouse or significant other by literally draining them of their vitality through incessant coitus. A related belief conveyed by some informants was that those afflicted with white liver not only had an insatiable sexual appetite but also had bad blood and transmitted a fatal infection to others.

A social worker shared a story about his first encounter with white liver while working for the Department of Public Welfare in Wise County, VA in the late 1950s. A woman came into his office one day seeking help for her daughter, who had just recently married.

The woman said she was concerned about her daughter's husband losing his job, adding that he had missed a lot of work because her daughter was "wearing him out." Unsure of what she was talking about, he pressed further, and the woman told him that her daughter had the white liver. He eventually surmised that the woman was talking indirectly about her daughter having a voracious sexual appetite. Flummoxed about what to do, he sheepishly recommended cold shower therapy and consultation with a physician.

Attributing the death of a man to an oversexed wife raises several questions about sexual mores in the past. Were women labeled ill by others because they openly admitted to enjoying sex with their husbands during a time when sex was not to be enjoyed? Were these women, and perhaps women in general, viewed as sexual predators, either by men or by other women?


source: Folk Medicine in Southern Appalachia, by Anthony P. Cavender, UNC Press, 2003



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