Loss of Voice

Take equal parts of pure olive oil, honey and Jamaica rum; mix well together. For an adult, one tablespoon three times a day; for a child three months old, from ten to fifteen drops — increase the dose according to age of child. If the cough is very severe, take the preparation when inclined to cough, always shaking well before using.

Source: The Kansas Home Cook-Book

Flax-Seed Tea

Upon an ounce of unbruised flax-seed and a little pulverized liquorice-root pour a pint of boiling (soft or rain) water, and place the vessel containing these ingredients near, but not on, the fire for four hours. Strain through a linen cloth. Make it fresh every day. An excellent drink in fever accompanied by a cough.

Source: The White House Cookbook, F.L. Gillette

To Destroy and Prevent Bed Bugs

Take two ounces of lard, and one ounce of quicksilver, mix well, and apply with a soft brush or feather where the pests frequent. Apply once a year.

Source: The Kansas Home Cook-Book

Thoroughwort Bitters

Make a strong tea of the thoroughwort–strain it, and when cool, put to a couple of quarts of it half a pint of French brandy, the peel of two or three fresh oranges, cut into small bits, and half a dozen bunches of fennel, or smallage seed. The seed and orange peel should be crowded into a bottle, then the tea and brandy turned in. The bottle should be corked tight. The bitters will keep good almost any length of time, and is an excellent remedy for bilious complaints, and can often be taken when the thoroughwort tea will not sit on the stomach. A wine glass of these bitters to a tumbler of water is about the right proportion. It should have a little sugar added to it before drinking it.

Source: The American Housewife

Diarrhoea

A moderately strong tea of blackberry-root. Make it palatable with sugar and cream, and let the child use it as ordinary drink. Or, let the child eat all pure loaf sugar as it will.

Source: The Kansas Home Cook-Book

To Keep the Hands from Perspiring

To keep the hands from perspiring, make a lotion consisting of a quarter of an ounce of powdered alum and one teaspoonful of spirits of ammonia in a pint of boiling water. When cool, bottle it, and use on the hands freely.

Source: Audel’s Household Helps, Hints and Receipts

Lip Salve

Dissolve a small lump of white sugar in a table-spoonful of rosewater, (common water will do, but is not as good.) Mix it with a couple of large spoonsful of sweet oil, a piece of spermaceti, of the size of half a butternut. Simmer the whole well together eight or ten minutes, then turn it into a small box.

Source: The American Housewife

Tooth Powder

Take pulverized chalk, and twice as much charcoal; make very fine, and add castile soap suds and spirits of camphor to make a thick paste. Apply with the finger and brush.

Source: The Kansas Home Cook-Book

Onions for a Cold

For a cold on the chest there is no better specific for most persons than well boiled or roasted onions. They may not agree with every one, but to persons with good digestion they will not only be
found to be a most excellent remedy for a cough, and the clogging of the bronchial tubes which is usually the cause of the cough, but if eaten freely at the outset of a cold, they will break up what promised, from the severity of the attack, to have been a serious one.

Source: Audel’s Household Helps, Hints and Receipts

Bloody Flux

Apply a suppository of linen dipt in Aqua Vitae.

Or, drink cold water, as largely as possible, taking nothing else till the flux stops.

Or, take a large apple, and at the top pick out all the core, and fill up the place with a piece of honey comb; (the honey being strained out,) roast the apple in embers, and eat it, and this will stop the flux immediately.

Or grated rhubarb, as much as lies on a shilling, with half as much of grated nutmeg, in a glass of white wine, at lying down, every other night. Tried.

Or take four drops of Laudanum, and apply to the belly a poultice of wormwood and red roses boiled in milk.

In a Dysentery, the worst of all fluxes, feed on rice, saloup, sago, and sometimes beef-tea; but no flesh.

To stop it, take a spoonful of suet melted over a slow fire. Do not let blood.

A person was cured in one day, by feeding on rice milk, and sitting a quarter of an hour in a shallow tub, having in it warm water three inches deep.

Source: Primitive Physic: or an easy and natural method of curing most diseases, John Wesley.