My Mum swore by bread poultices for boils and abscesses. She also saved the fat from cooking the Christmas goose, stored it in a kilner jar and us kids were terrified of getting a cough or a cold because she`d warm the kilner jar by the fire until the goose grease melted and then she`d rub our chest, throat and back with it and we`d go to school stinking to high heaven.
She bought all sorts of weird and wonderful concoctions from a local herbalists and brewed vile tasting teas from what looked like dried wood shavings but were supposed cures for all and sundry.
She didn`t believe in dental fillings and swore they poisoned your body and said if God had meant us to have lumps of metal in our mouths he`d have fashioned us in the style of robots.
Tampons were the work of the Devil in her eyes and when I was a young teenager and asked could she buy me tampons instead of towels, she went mad and said it was vitally important I stayed "intact" down there until I was married..
She insisted the USA sending men to the Moon disrupted the weather and we`d no right to poke our noses on another planet.
People who didn`t wash their net curtains weekly or donkey stone their doorsteps were lazy, purple eye shadow and eye liner should be banned, white stiletto shoes were common, Pans People weren`t right in the head prancing around in their underwear, the Beatles needed a damned good haircut and all that head shaking would give them brain damage, dandelions made you wee a lot, outside toilets were healthier for you and loose tea made a better cuppa than those new fangled teabags which in her opinion was like brewing tea in a sock.
As you can gather my Mum ( God love her ) was a one off original who`d be well into her hundreds by now but sadly died in her 60`s.
The onion and milk worked for me, too. I suspect it was because it was so vile I had to get better or drink more (though the onion has vitamin C and anti-microbial properties and warm milk is soothing so I can see maybe where it came from).
