Category: First Aid

Medicines in the Fifties and Sixties, when I was a child, were deliberately awful; this was to stop you thinking you were ill. 

We never had Calpol.  We had medicines designed by evil professors – with no taste buds.

Getting a sore throat wasn’t at all advantageous back then as we’d be prescribed the foulest of all tablets: Dequadin.   It’d have been preferable having your tonsils ripped out by some vicious goblin who’d only qualified that week in an ENT ward.

Getting a cold and being forced to hide your head under a towel with a chipped bowl containing Friar’s Balsam taking effect didn’t encourage you buy anything else from the monastery.   I always seemed to get a cold on a Sunday – the treatment would coincide with “Sing something simple” being on the radio.  As if having a cold wasn’t punishment enough – vapours from hell and a radio programme from an even worse place.

The one medical thing I did learn (the hard way): Alka Seltzer – not the ideal product to make lemonade.  All that fizzes is not gold, as the nurse with the stomach pump told me.

Gripe Water’s off, love.

As a kid, I managed to get most of the childhood illnesses: measles; mumps; scarlet fever; chicken pox (I can still smell the calamine lotion) and German measles (which, oddly, the Germans don’t call English Measles).  I’d have had diphtheria, except my mum couldn’t spell it.

I’d had all these by the age of ten, and wished there’d been an I-Spy book for me to have ticked them all off.  I never got West Nile Fever (25-points), even though we did live near the River Wandle.

When I was ill, it was my dad who looked after me; my mum invariably had “one of her heads” – Balham’s answer to Cerberus – so caring for the sick fell to my dad.

Whether it was dabbing calamine lotion on me; pumping me full of penicillin or just sitting on the bath while I occupied another piece of bathroom furniture, he’d chat away.  Usually about sport or comedy.

Dad would ask whether the Tommy Baldwin/George Graham swap was good for Chelsea; how lucky Kent had been with wicketkeepers through the years, as he extolled the virtues of the (then) very young Alan Knott and would suggest getting comedy records out of the library, as he wanted to introduce me to The Goons.

All this lead me to feel better – however unwell I was.

If ever I’m unwell now, I talk to myself in the style of Eccles, Bluebottle and Minnie Bannister.  More effective than kaolin & morphine.

When you’re a kid, there are various (usually medical) things which you observe that only old people use.

Last week, after sixty-five years, I had to buy corn plasters.  As a child, I was aware of aging relatives using them.  My question is, will I be using medical aids I’d witnessed in my Balham flat in the ‘60s?

Perhaps I’ll start dabbing myself with 4711 Eau de Cologne; I may start protecting my clothes with mothballs or begin sucking cloves for toothache (one of the few things not mentioned by the witches in Macbeth)?

I wonder if the bottles of Kaolin & Morphine; Milk of Magnesia and Friar’s Balsam I currently have in my loft are past their sell-by date?

Obviously, medicine has progressed over the past sixty-years, the doctor no longer visits with a black bag, but can give you a password for a Zoom call.

One thing is for certain, I won’t be creating my own laxatives.  I had a great aunt who lived in our flats.  Once she invited me into her bedroom as she was getting ready to go to work.  Aside from the overriding smell of peroxide, on her bedside table was a cup, full of brown water, in which floated several actual rotting senna pods.  The mere sight of these sent me rushing to her toilet.  I guess they worked.

Pass the smelling salts, please.

In 1972, in the 4^th year of my Tooting grammar school, we had a term learning First Aid.

A few lessons of Latin and suddenly everyone thought they could be a doctor.

Sadly, we were so badly behaved in these eight-weeks, the only thing we learned what to do was make a sling. 

Broken leg; typhus; West Nile Fever?  We’d have been quite hopeless – unless any of these conditions could have been cured using an old Cub scarf.

These days, most homes will have sophisticated First Aid kits.  With the contents, you could carry out minor operations – although you’d have to keep your work surfaces clean – and clear.

Growing up in the ‘60s, if your ailment wasn’t treatable with Germolene, Friar’s Balsam or three miles of lint, you’d be put on the cart the moment it entered your street. 

If you broke a limb playing sport at school, the deranged PE master would tell you you’ve got another one.  The school First Aid kit consisted of a sponge; a bucket filled with water from the River Wandle and a junior hacksaw from the metalwork classroom should anyone have gangrene before the master put them on the 155 bus home.

To paraphrase Robert Duvall, “I love the smell of calamine lotion in the morning.”