Culchies and "the cure"

joe stodge

I've jus t got off the phone to my aunt from Dublin who lives in deepest darkest Cavan. She was telling me she burned her hand in work on Friday. Nothing that would require hospital, just some savlon and a small bandage.

One of the girls she works with suggested that she should go up town to see some old woman who has "the cure". My aunt asked "what is the cure?".
It was explained to her that this old lady licks your wound and says a prayer for you and the burn will heal, oh and you have to give her a small donation.

So you pay someone to lick and open wound to heal it???
She went on to explain to my aunt there are a few others in the village that have "the cure" for other illnesses/ailments all of whom you have to make a donation to for the privilege.

This can't be true, are they really that mental in the country or is it just some snake oil scheme?

Anyone else ever hear of someone with "the cure"?.

No Pants

But if you let someone from the country lick an open would, you could end up with rabies.

Sir Arthur Daley

I might go see her have a problem in a delicate area.

shruikan2553

Havent experienced it personally but maybe I just avoid people that would believe such crap.

Lucifer MorningStar

They have a few good songs

_Redzer_

To me the cure is day 2 on the beer to get over your hangover.

It's the only cure to an ailment I care about anyway

c_man

It's seventh-son-of-a-seventh-son level of sh!te. Funny though. I've heard of others like mad auld wans who would bury a raw steak out the back to cure ringworm and the likes.

joe stodge wrote: »

So you pay someone to lick and open wound to heal it???

What I do in Amsterdam on my holidays is nobody's business but my own.

jaykay74

Are you not mixing up the cure and the plague?

Hotfail.com

Couldn't she just go looking for compo instead?

Tokyo

Sir Arthur Daley wrote: »

I might go see her have a problem in a delicate area.

You'd have the "small donation" covered too...

Arthur Beesley

Jesus, who knows where the auld ones tongue has been. (She could have been rimming her husband that morning, for all we know).

Better get tetanus shot as well if you for this option.

Sunnyisland

Which reminds me

I went to the doctor's office the other day and found out that

my new doctor is a young female and drop-dead gorgeous!

I was embarrassed, but she said, "Don't worry, I'm a

Professional - I've seen it all before."



Just tell me what's wrong and I'll "check it out."






I said. "My wife thinks my Penis tastes funny."

kneemos

I'm from "out in the country"can't say I've heard of it.

TheBody

"Cures" are very common thing in the midlands. There are "cures" for a variety of ailments!!

Cee-Jay-Cee

joe stodge wrote: »

So you pay someone to lick and open wound to heal it..

But it wasn't an open wound, it was a simple burn that required no more than a bit of cream and a bandage.

wazky

Bone setters are the best.

Unqualified people cracking bones back into position, what could go wrong.

c_man

joe stodge wrote: »

This can't be true, are they really that mental in the country or is it just some snake oil scheme?

Hmm. Seems like Dublin has no shortage of reiki healing centres... Let us have our mad auld wans casting off demons!

nuckeythompson

Funnily enough I met an old man on the Meath Cavan border who had the cure. Had pretty bad steam burn on my wrist. Like a drunken fool I let him put his mouth on it.
Ended up in hospital as it was 2nd degree burns and was seriously infected. Met the looney a while later and explained what I was told in the hospital and his reply was , I should have come back to him.

Weird culchie **** alright and complete BS and had I not have gone to hospital it would have been very serious

IvySlayer

Did she use boiled 7-up?

dirtyden

What a strange thing to make up and post on an internet forum.

Ruu

IvySlayer wrote: »

Did she use boiled 7-up?

Flat 7-Up is the Irish Mammy elixir.

Chance The Rapper

A family friend can cure thrush thrush with a kiss, I've seen it.

suicide_circus

nuckeythompson wrote: »

Funnily enough I met an old man on the Meath Cavan border who had the cure. Had pretty bad steam burn on my wrist. Like a drunken fool I let him put his mouth on it.
Ended up in hospital as it was 2nd degree burns and was seriously infected. Met the looney a while later and explained what I was told in the hospital and his reply was , I should have come back to him.

Weird culchie **** alright and complete BS and had I not have gone to hospital it would have been very serious

You forgot to bring the victim child

fleet_admiral

Ruu wrote: »

Flat 7-Up is the Irish Mammy elixir.

And the old bottles of lucozade that had the yellow plastic wrapper on it

Gran Hermano

Robert Smith?

Pretzill

Have heard of the 'cure' - the one that cures burns is called a frogs lick in these parts - which means the curer licked a frog at some stage and got the power to cure scalds and minor burns -

(I'm well aware of how ridiculous that sounds - but the placebo effect does work so I suppose if you believe it - who knows?)

I only heard pf these cures when I moved rural - the cure where I come from normally involved a shot of whiskey the morning of a hangover. But still I find it charming that some people still have these odd superstitions.

Ted_YNWA

I have a load of dock-leaves out the back, natures own savlon. They are yours for a small donation.

Arthur Beesley

Any seventh sons of a seventh son in the house?

TheBody

Cure of the burn and sprains would be very common.

joe stodge

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-24165520
27 September 2013 Last updated at 05:13 GMT Share this pagePrint
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The cure and other miraculous tales of Ireland
By Nuala McCann
BBC News

Mickey McGuigan, 73, is our guide in the world of miracles

Mickey McGuigan lives with his brother in a forest swathed in the soft mist of ancient druid magic, somewhere near Forkhill in County Armagh.

That was where filmmaker Daniel Vernon came upon him and learned about Ireland's miracle makers.

In some parts of Ireland, if you have warts or backache or gout, you get what is known as "the cure".

Someone will direct you to a man or a woman who has it.

It is as common as going to see the doctor when you are ill.

The cure is a secret prayer and a set of actions handed down through generations in families. There is a reverence about it. A person who has 'the cure' has a special gift.

The idea fascinates Englishman Daniel almost as much as it fascinates Irishman Mickey. He is 73, a farmer and writer. He is a man in love with the land, with a face that has seen plenty and still wears the wonder of it all.

His home is an old stone house in the back end of the woods. It is battered, crumbling, with windows on the brink of breaking.

Perhaps Mickey himself is a relic of another life that is crumbling - one where the magic of a whispered prayer can rest easy alongside modern farming life, the old tractor tyre abandoned in the grass, a ragged curtain fluttering in the breeze of a farmhouse window and up to 100 channels on the HD television.

But even though "the television man" has come to the woods outside Forkhill, Mickey has not forgotten the old ways.

He hauls out a manual typewriter - £30 it cost him - and talks about the book he is writing about miracles.


Eamon McDermott is asked to cure ringworm in cattle by spitting on them
Mickey is the lynchpin for Daniel Vernon's documentary. The Miraculous Tales of Mickey McGuigan is about the people of the borderlands and the old Irish beliefs - including the belief that a cure will rid a person of warts, or the croup or backache or toothache with a bit of spittle, or a hand held on the spot and a prayer.

"Seventy three years I've lived, through the bother of the north," said Mickey, "And my business is the miracle business."

He mixes tales of the "bad article (person) of a witch" that would "take your head off in the woods", with tales of the time "the English Army came with their helicopters".

He knows the people with the cure, he has them down in his book.

"Eamon McDermott has a cure for the ringworm in cattle," he said. "He spits on it, makes the sign of the cross on the ground and off it goes, like a flash.

"A woman with the shingles went to a man in Iniskeen. He went out and got clay that never saw sun and had no worms. He had to dig down for it. He put the clay on her head and told her to come back in three days. She got the cure,"

He lists the old Irish traditions - stories that trip off his tongue as easily as a catechism. For believers, family position is important for the gift of the cure to pass down through generations.

"If the seventh son of a seventh son is born in Ireland, you put a live worm in the heart of his hand and when the worm withers and dies, the child has the cure for everything - so the story goes," Mickey said.

"People will come for miles to get a cure. Mary Brady has a cure for the colic: She's better than any doctor," he said.


People travel to visit Mary Brady whom they believe has several 'cures'.
Her cure involves a string to "release the knot in the stomach" and a prayer.

In his documentary, Daniel Vernon also met Fr Noel Conlon, known as the healing priest who prays with people and offers them comfort. They come in their droves to see him.

He captured the Reverend John Purcell on celluloid, an evangelical preacher, born an Irish traveller and raised a Catholic. He is the eldest of 19 brothers and sisters. He shares his gift of tongues. He can hold an audience in the palm of his hand. He has fire in his belly.

Daniel Vernon's journey into the world of Irish cures is a magical one that is filmed with an artist's eye. His are portraits of a vanishing Ireland, a painting alight with country faces - farmers leaning over the gate at the mart - all dour faces and flat caps.

A plaster statue of the Virgin Mary sits on a windowsill, her head has fallen off and lies beside her blue gown. There are weeds blowing in the soft breeze in the fields and snow piles up around a Celtic stone cross in an Irish graveyard .

Daniel won a Bafta for his documentary, The Man who eats Badgers and other Strange Tales of Bodmin Moor.

From the English moor to the wilds of south Armagh, he understands the connection that farmers have with the land. When he went on his travels along the Irish borderland, he ended up with a phonebook of names of all those people with cures. It spoke to his heart.


Reverend John Purcell is the eldest of 19 brothers and sisters
"I avoided those who were doing it for money," he said. "It is so rare to find something so purely altruistic.

"A lot of people take on to perform a cure. It seems a really beautiful thing to give to a stranger, whether or not it works. Think of a gruff farmer who stops his day's work to take a phone call from a guy about his gout."

But it was Mickey who brought this documentary film together who became our guide into this other world.

"I hope I grow old like him with that feeling of contentment. He is happy with life, he does not want for anything," said Daniel.

Would the documentary maker seek a cure?

He has done and said it seemed to work. Like Mickey, he is on the fence on the issue... but believes the world is much richer place for people who have the cure.

"They certainly comfort people. That is the most important thing.

"If they are not taking money, what harm can it do? A lot of people are desperate for someone to put their arms around them and tell them it is going to be okay."




Mad bastards, the lot of them

UCDVet

Psssst - it will heal just as well without someone licking it. Possibly even better.

MRnotlob606

ask Rob Smith about "the cure"

c_man

Arthur Beesley wrote: »

Any seventh sons of a seventh son in the house?

http://www.danny-gallagher.com/

takamichinoku

Oddly there aren't any people like that around home. There's a few who have dead relatives who used to be at that and they'll sometimes be spoken of as if it's possible that they could've inherited it. There's also one excommunicated (something like that anyway) masochistic mental of a priest who was absolutely terrified of my dad because he had "healing hands" or something.
We did actually got some extremely garlicky green mush that was forced into a calpol bottle once from an aunt that was made by a holy healer woman for burn wounds, couldn't get it out so it's just sitting in the back of the fridge for the last decade ...I should check on that next time I'm home. It seemed like it perhaps had some sort of logic behind it though, more than a lick of spit anyway.

Those guys mostly seemed to be supplanted by the cult of Padre Pio back home, the kind of people who would've been big into healers got big into him instead, chasing after his relics and all. That guy's got more support than Jesus from a lot of people.
Got this crazy Padre Pio chain cake thing from one person once a few days after my dad was diagnosed with leukemia. Don't think it helped.

Adamantium

A man from Leitrim, there's a lot of things we don't understand yet in biology. It seems to be common to all cultures. Bizarre.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf248VirUtM

The sped up thermal imagining of his hands compared to a "normal" individual hands is fascinating. They seem to emit a WAY higher level of consistent temperature

ash23

I've heard of healers but never heard reference to "the cure" other than in a hair of the dog kind of way.

Heard of a young lad who cures warts and an ould one who makes a cream that will heal nappy rash, eczema, scalds and burns, acne....basically any skin ailment. Even the local chemist stock tubs of it.


Bio energy is the latest. Supposedly there's a man out the road who can tell exactly what's wrong with you just by looking at you and can cure it.

It's all a load of ****e but it's no less mad than believing in fortune tellers or unproven alternative medicine.

The number of people who've given me tales of cures for an incurable disease I have is nuts. From diet to swimming in the sea or simply getting some fresh air....everyone's an expert.

Shaun Plays Games

Pouring water on sporting injuries

Joe Doe

Vinegar, wd40, baking soda and honey fix up most broken things. Medics use honey and leeches for anti-bacterial whotknots.
If you've the aul e-bowler that's making the rounds, just chuck some doses of colloidal silver at it and hope for the best.

Fr_Dougal

joe stodge wrote: »

I've jus t got off the phone to my aunt from Dublin who lives in deepest darkest Cavan. She was telling me she burned her hand in work on Friday. Nothing that would require hospital, just some savlon and a small bandage.

One of the girls she works with suggested that she should go up town to see some old woman who has "the cure". My aunt asked "what is the cure?".
It was explained to her that this old lady licks your wound and says a prayer for you and the burn will heal, oh and you have to give her a small donation.

So you pay someone to lick and open wound to heal it???
She went on to explain to my aunt there are a few others in the village that have "the cure" for other illnesses/ailments all of whom you have to make a donation to for the privilege.

This can't be true, are they really that mental in the country or is it just some snake oil scheme?

Anyone else ever hear of someone with "the cure"?.

Lol. Dubs will fall for anything. I remember we sent my cousins out to pick up 'currants' to bake a cake, the amount of rabbit poop they collected was hilarious.

The Diabolical Monocle

Put her before the medical council.

In a live broadcast from a stadium of 10,000 people.

An excellent opportunity for her to demonstrate the validity of her powers.


The world is watching Maeve, ..... go right ahead.

Young Blood

The only 'cure' I've heard of in the midlands is the one where you get drunk. Apparently it's a mild sedative.

I did this when I got laser eye surgery. My eyes were burning and it felt as though there was grit in my eyes so I went for the 'cure' which consisted of drinking three days solidly until the pain went away.

Ditch

There's a Wort Tree, not far from here. Has a natural bowl in it. Put the wort in it, or wipe the water in it. Cure ye wort, it will. Have to leave a scrap of cloth, as an offering for the spirits of the place. They like that.

Gypsys used to stop there. Romani's. Not the Pav's. They stayed the other side of the town.

Here's a picture I took, of the Wort Tree, a couple of years ago.

DaisyFay

Licking burns is common in travelers and is a cultural phenomenon in Ireland apparently... I burned my hand with steam a while back and it got infected, and since I didn't bother with antiseptic or anything it just got worse and there were red streaks coming away from the burn going halfway up my arm. I was in college and didn't want to waste money on anything 'unnecessary' like savlon because I'd be going home in a couple of days, and i figured licking it couldn't make it worse... and it didn't, the following day all the red streaks were gone and it was completely healed in a few days. I'm not sure what makes a random old lady's spit superior though so I wouldn't go that far.

rawn

joe stodge wrote: »

I've jus t got off the phone to my aunt from Dublin who lives in deepest darkest Cavan. She was telling me she burned her hand in work on Friday. Nothing that would require hospital, just some savlon and a small bandage.

One of the girls she works with suggested that she should go up town to see some old woman who has "the cure". My aunt asked "what is the cure?".
It was explained to her that this old lady licks your wound and says a prayer for you and the burn will heal, oh and you have to give her a small donation.

So you pay someone to lick and open wound to heal it???
She went on to explain to my aunt there are a few others in the village that have "the cure" for other illnesses/ailments all of whom you have to make a donation to for the privilege.

This can't be true, are they really that mental in the country or is it just some snake oil scheme?

Anyone else ever hear of someone with "the cure"?.

Actually, my aunt did this. She scalded herself really badly across her chest and shoulder. Was told by doctors she would always have to cover it up in the sun and it would be dry and painful for the rest of her life. She went and some gummy old man licked the whole wound and it healed up within days. I don't believe in this kind of stuff, but that's the story she told us and her skin is fine now. Forgot about it til now.

Tail Docker

I have the cure for a crick in the neck. It was passed down to me from an expensive physiotherapist.

DaisyFay

Saliva naturally has antibacterial properties and contains antibodies though, so anybodies saliva would probably do. Old people would have more antibodies though... I think its more a case of only some old people being willing to lick other peoples manky burns for money, than it is a case of them having a gift.

Tail Docker

DaisyFay wrote: »

Saliva naturally has antibacterial properties and contains antibodies though, so anybodies saliva would probably do. Old people would have more antibodies though... I think its more a case of only some old people being willing to lick other peoples manky burns for money, than it is a case of them having a gift.

If you have a bad cut, and it's dirty, some say, that getting a dog to lick it will heal it really quickly. The science bit, whereby dogs have terminator salive re bugs, kinda backs that up. I know it sounds odd, and off, but my red-setter may "have the cure..."

whupdedo

Is it any worse than believing mystic meg from the back of the woman's way, spouting ****e about Venus being in line with your anus

Tail Docker

whupdedo wrote: »

Is it any worse than believing mystic meg from the back of the woman's way, spouting ****e about Venus being in line with your anus

That's just bunkum. Jonathan Cainer is where it's at.

kingchess

when I was around 17 or so I had a disc partially out of place in my back which caused pain down my leg,suffered with this for a year or so, the doctor told me to stay in bed and rest,my Aunt took me to the local bonesetter who moved his thumb up and down my spine while pulling one leg gently back and up(not as erotic as its sounds),I heard a little crack as disc popped back into place and never had trouble ever again with my back and that was a long long time ago.

Joe Doe

Don't let any aul dog lick your wounds, esp, if you have lowered immune system, due to risk from Capnocytophaga Canimorsus. Manuka honey is the way to go.