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A. Varesano interviewing Susie Zosak -1-
8/14/72
Tape 26-1

SZ The babies got sick, and you had to get the doctor, and you had to keep runnin' up and down with bran bags when they had, like, one of ours, well, the boy, too, used to get bronchitis. And when they'd get it often, and then they had mastoids,, and you didn't have no schedule. The schedule came out as it came along, you know what I mean?

AV What are bran bags?

SZ Well they didn't have no sulfa pills or anything then, they had no kind of penicillin, and if you got, say, lots of them got pneumonia, like a son of our....

AV And what did you for them?

SZ It was hard. They didn't have anything like they do now. They didn't have anything to check- they had it, you put bran bags on, and rub them with camphorated oil, and.....

AV What is that bran bags?

SZ That was like a chalk, but it's the shell of a wheat, it's light. Well, you heat it in the oven, and you took one off and one on, One of our kids had bronchitis quite often. One of our kids had bonchitis quite often. She'd get choked up, you couldn't breathe, you know? That's Agnes, that lives in the .... And even when she went in training, well, they found like little scars on her thing, and they asked did she have pneumonia or bronchitis when she was a baby? And she did. She had it lot of it. Once you get bronchitis, you get it often then. Just every so often you get it.

AV And the only thing they could do for it in those days was just heated bran bags?

SZ Yes, you got a medicine from the doctor, too. It was a little red medicine. I don't know what it was, but I always had it on hand.

AV Where did you get the idea for the bran bags?

SZ Oh, that was an old custom. Some people would stew onions and put stewed onions to loosen that, mucus, you know?

AV How would they put on the stewed onions?

SZ Put it in between two cheesecloths, like.

AV And just wrap it up like that?

SZ Yeah, or some people used to put flax seed.

AV What is flax seed?

SZ Flax seed is when you have a sore finger or sore when it festered, one time it would fester, you know what I mean? You didn't check it. You had to wait if you got infection. If you got infection, it started jumpin', well you stuck it in boiling water up and down to kill it, like, you know? Kill the germ. It would stop sometimes. And if you couldn't stop it, well then you just had an infected finger or.... You had to wait until it festered and until it all pussed out, you know, with the puss, until you put flax seed on. Flax seed is, grows, I guess. Its like greasy. You cook it a little bit, and put it between things, too. That drawed, and if you put it on you didn't feel the pain. And when you had, whenever that would fester, you had an awful lot of pain. I can remember when I was a kid and I lived down with my mother, whenever I lived in Humboldt with my mother, and she went somewhere, I don't know where she went , and I was layin' on the floor and I was cryin', and the neighbor heard, in the next door, and she wanted to know what was the matter? And it was jumpin' so hard, and festerin' that, you know.....

AV What do you mean, jumpin'?

SZ It used to pain, like a jumpin' pain, until it festered, you can't open it until it's ready to open. You have to come to a little top like, you know, like the pus comin' right to the skin. And I remember one time I had it here, and it didn't come to a thing, and the doctor then cut it all the way down deep into,