There's lots of interest today in alternative medicine, such as acupuncture, homeopathic medicine, reflexology, aromatherapy. There's probably something — a little something — in all of them, but I keep thinking how nice it is to have conventional medicine and veterinary science available, too. If we had no scientific alternatives to alternative medicine, we would be back where we started at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, back with home remedies and folk cures, and yes, superstitions.

I fell into such speculations by accident. I've been reading a new book, "The Best of Texas Folk and Folklore 1916 - 1954," edited by Mody Boatright, Wilson Hudson and Allen Maxwell (University of North Texas Press, 1998), a collection of material selected from the first 25 volumes of annual publications of the Texas Folklore Society. One chapter that captivated me was "Ranch Remedios," written by Frost Woodhull and originally published in the 1930 Texas Folklore Society publication, "Man, Bird, and Beast."

Woodhull wrote that he started out to collect veterinary folk remedies — remedios — found on ranches in the early days, but soon found that his contributors were also providing remedies for human ailments, too.

Frequently the same remedy was used for both man and beast.

All the remedies used items easily available on the frontier or on isolated ranches: lard, kerosene, gunpowder and turpentine formed the foundation of home pharmacy stock.

Some "cures" were merely common sense make-do's, such as fried onion poultices placed on the pneumonia patient's chest. To ease a teething baby, Woodhull's contributors recommended, "let baby chew rattlesnake rattles, or if they are not handy, six-shooter cartridges."

Other remedies seem today, to say the least, to be a trifle far-fetched: "For a fever blister, put your little finger in your ear and get a little ear wax. Rub this on the blister."

I enjoyed the dry humorous commentary that the author interspersed among his collected remedios. For example, to treat a horse's bellyache, it was recommended to "bathe belly with strong red pepper tea, then make him drink half a pint of same. Patient will stampede, but lose cramps."

One livestock problem discussed was the "creeps," a disease which Woodhull says, "affects cattle during protracted drouths when there is no green feed for a long period of time. The animal walks with a rather stealthy gait, as though it were trying to slip up on something. In the advanced stages the animal affected has a pacing or racking gait."

Woodhull's contributors suggest several "cures" that hark back to the old custom of bleeding a patient whenever the "doctor" didn't know what else to do.

In conclusion, though, Woodhull interjected his own common-sense cure for the creeps: "I personally have gotten better results by the use of three or four pounds per day of cottonseed meal in a feed trough, together with a good filling of hay, for 30 or 40 days. I will warrant this last treatment."