Medicine

Nurses c1910-1920

Mrs Everitt: The doctor, you paid tuppence a week and the doctor gave you what my uncle used to call ‘pink pills for pale people’ and a bottle of medicine which had to be nasty or it didn’t do you any good, and that was about all. There was none of this research into health that there is now.

Interviewer: Was the doctor a local person?

Mrs Everitt: Oh yes, he was a notability in the village, the parson and the doctor, and a solicitor, would be well thought of, you know.

Interviewer: So he worked mostly in the village?

Mrs Everitt: Mm, he lived in the village in a biggish house and his children went to boarding school, away. But, he lived in the village and saw to the people in the village, and he knew us all and he came if you were really ill, he’d come to the house and you’d know him and he’d know you.

Interviewer: Was there anybody in the village who helped out with herbal medicine or had good recipes, and so on?

Mrs Everitt: There was always in each part of the village, a woman who was a midwife, she delivered the babies, and if you had anybody die in your house she laid them out, and she usually had a good knowledge of herbs. We didn’t go to the doctor much because, you know, if you’d run out of your benefit you couldn’t go. But we used to go up to the chemist for quinine, oil of violets, impecuana, which the midwife-cum-nurse would give you a list of for your, if you mentioned to her what you’d got, she’d know what you could go and fetch and she’d mix it up for you and you’d have it. We had quite good health, you know, our family. I can’t remember much. My aunty - had an aunt who used to come from Nottingham - and I used to go across the fields with her to get yarrow and meadow sweet, and various things from the fields which she made up into kind of doses. She gave those, or sold them, to the people round about her in the very poor part of Nottingham.

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