VILLAGE HEALTHY PART II

Often the old Cod Liver Oil was enough to keep us healthy (ugh...remember that taste!).  There was no rush for an antibiotic shot (hence little over abuse), nor a rush to the E.R.  First of all a lot of the living that we did as children was based on a whole lot of exercise, morning to evening when we could get away with it,.  A nice day?  Out we went.
And we stayed out, unless it rained really hard.

Also, we enjoyed  a nutritious and sensible pattern of eating.  We ate slowly, at the family table.  That offered a sharing time as well as a more leisurely rhythm of eating, good for our digestion.  Thank the Lord, the days of cell phones dividing us was way in the future.  We said, "May I be excused, when we were ready to get up and leave" or we waited for everyone to finish.  We picked up dirty dishes and cleaned the kitchen with our Mom.  There were no TV's in the kitchen.

We ate lots and lots of fresh vegetables and meat that had next to nothing added to it, it might even have come from our own henhouse or a neighbor's farm.  We ate Mom's home cooked desserts, again with just enough sugar.  The pantry was full of basic stock and not bags and bags of candies (Halloween stash often lasted a whole long time). Mom canned and froze a lot of food 

so we had the good stuff all year round.

If we got sick, well, most of the time Mom handled that or if it came to it the family doc came to the house or we went to his very simple office, often staffed by only the doc.

We survived and we did not sue anyone....!  We learned to deal with life without medication..imagine that.  We had failure, success, and responsibility and we learned from it all.  We even survived without seat belts....and mercury fillings.  Remember those dentist chairs and the dentist who did everything? We never heard of a hygienist.

  What a different day!  All the squabble politically today, all the constant bombardment of ads for medications everywhere we look (and nothing is sacred either).  The information overload of things that could be wrong with us if we do not do such and such gets bigger each day .  It is relaxing just to look back on a simpler life and breathe!  I am, of course, all for educating ourselves on how to keep healthy, or even better, to control our own health care.  But, today everything has gone overboard in a miasma of profit and greed, and often just by the ever increasing "nanny-state".

Of course, one had all the childhood diseases, that was shared sibling to sibling and kid to kid.
It was a given.  The motto was "get it over when you are young."  A truism there.

Sometimes what was wrong was indeed wrong, even then.
 I just about recall the bright red quarantine signs on doors warning that everyone must keep out.  That meant diphtheria or scarlet fever usually. A gentleman on the web recalls when he caught scarlet fever.  He writes that the teacher asked him to clean out the desk of a student who was out with it, he then contracted it. His teacher did not touch anything and was not infected.  It meant a long confinement and isolation at home for the student, though.

Happily, those diseases are rarely seen today.

                                                           All photos from Pinterest

The worst conditions my sister and I got were terrible cases of poison ivy which our beloved family doc, Dr. Elias, gave us a shot for if it got really bad, which it often did. I think the shots were Prednisone. The next blog posts will be all about our family doc and others who helped us heal when we were young in the Village, and in Taunton.  Stay tuned, there are lots more.  As a matter of fact, when I started this series I did not have much. Then a lot serendipidously came to light and I hope you enjoy it all as much as I do writing it.

Obviously, hoping you will all chime in and make it even more interesting.  If you have looked at the statistics of page views on this blog:  over 20,500!  From all over the world.