I was reading a column in my Minnesota hometown newspaper the other day about health care in the days of yore (actually the 1950s and ‘60s) and had to laugh because the writer’s recollections of her mother’s home remedies were exactly like my own experience.

When we were sick enough to stay home from school, Mom would slather our chests with Rawleigh Medicated Ointment and then wrap a wool sock around our neck and send us to the couch. It didn’t matter if it was the stomach flu or a head cold, her solution was the same — it was Rawleigh “salve” to the rescue.

I don’t think the wool sock she bound around our neck helped at all and only made us itch. But there was no arguing with Mom over what she deemed a tried-and-true remedy. She administered Rexall brand aspirin to lower a fever, but beyond that and cough drops, there was no cold medicine. Perhaps it hadn’t been invented yet.

If we weren’t better in three days, she hauled us to Doc Simonson, whose office was in the same building as the dentist we visited once a year. You may remember from an earlier column that we were subjected to dental care without Novocaine, so to have the family doctor and dentist in the same building created a true shop of horrors for me and my brothers.

It was no-frills care, no small talk and no bedside manner with Doc Simonson. If we were running a fever, a shot of penicillin was given. We reminisced in later years about how he seemed to take a running leap as he plunged the needle into our backside. It usually did the trick, though.

There was little pampering under Mom’s care.

She was sympathetic to a point, but I don’t remember her ever making chicken soup and bringing it to us on a silver platter. If we had the stomach flu, we got orange-flavored Hi-C from a can and dry white-bread toast, and generally had to get up and make it ourselves.

Cuts and scrapes were treated with Mercurochrome, a topical antiseptic made with mercury — that’s right, mercury — that turned skin red. School nurses slathered it on playground-induced cuts and Mom always kept a bottle in the medicine cabinet.

I don’t think any of us suffered long-term effects of being doused with mercury, but the Food and Drug Administration removed merbromin (the generic name) from the “generally recognized as safe” and into the “untested” classification, which essentially stopped its distribution in America in 1998 over fears of potential mercury poisoning. That’s according to Wikipedia.

We also routinely used iodine or rubbing alcohol on small wounds. No wussy Neosporin for us. Once again, Neosporin probably hadn’t been invented when I was a kid. If there was a product that didn’t evoke screams of agony back then, we didn’t have it on hand.

For all our seemingly ancient home remedies and health-care practices, most of us baby boomers survived childhood largely unscathed. There may have been some magic to Mom’s wool sock method, but I ditched that for a bottle of Nyquil long ago.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by e-mail at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com