My first thought was – no tissues! All those extra handkerchiefs to wash, dry and iron – yucky. And there were none of the over-the-counter medications that make colds a bit easier to live with these days. For Sarah, dealing with colds would have meant the old-fashioned home remedies:
- Hot drinks, like lemon and honey, with or without whisky, and lemon-barley water;
- Essential oils of camphor or cloves, inhaled in steam or mixed with grease or fat to be used as chest rubs;
- Mustard plasters or mustard baths
If Sarah had any Maori friends, they might have suggested a tea of hoiheri bark (lacebark) and an inhalation of vapours from boiled kahikatea bark. Plenty of warmth and rest, and a lot of time to recover, would have been the order of the day.
The common cold would have been far more of a threat to Sarah’s family than it is to us today. For one thing, there was no sick leave. If William had developed a heavy cold and had to take to his bed, he would have lost working days and income, which would have put the whole family at risk. For another thing, the potential complications of a simple cold were far more dangerous in a world without antibiotics and modern medical care.
Sarah’s number one priority would have been to prevent her family from getting sick in the first place. Whether she sewed them into flannel from autumn to spring, as was often recommended, we don’t know, but you would have to hope that the spring-time unwrapping of such a family coincided with the annual bath! She would certainly have made sure they were warmly-dressed and well wrapped up for winter weather. She might not have had much idea how colds spread (come to that, neither do most of my work-mates and fellow commuters, who so generously bring their germs to share) but she would have been concerned that no-one took a chill from getting caught out in the rain or breathing damp night air. And like most mums, if she got sick herself, she would probably have had to soldier on taking care of the family, rather than taking to her bed with a hot toddy and a good book.
