The cures of old times
The Medicine of the Italian Immigrants in the Serra Gaúcha
In the early years of the twentieth century, up in the mountains of the Italian Colonies, when the forest was still larger than the fields and the doctor arrived perhaps two or three times a month, every chapel had its person of trust. She wore no uniform, she had no diploma, and not even a sign above the door. To everyone she was simply Aunt Caterina. A widow for many years, she lived in a little wooden house among the rows of vines. In front of the house she kept a garden that was not only for eating. There grew sage, rue, mallow, chamomile, artemisia, mint, tansy, and many other herbs that she had learned to use with her mother, still in the Veneto, and that after the ocean had found good soil even in the Serra. If a child fell from the cart, if a settler cut himself with the axe, or if a woman was seized by the pains of childbirth in the middle of the night, no one sent at once to call the doctor. First a child was sent running to Aunt Caterina’s house.
She would arrive with her bag of esparto, a rosary in her pocket, and great calm. While the others despaired, she spoke few words, but always the right ones. She washed the wounds with boiled water, prepared poultices of crushed herbs, bandaged with clean linen rags, and prayed softly, as her grandmother had taught her. For the cough she made an infusion of mallow and honey. For the stomachache there were tisanes of chamomile and mint. For the fevers, cool compresses and plenty of rest. For women’s pains, infusions that smelled of the mountains. And with every remedy she repeated that God had put into nature everything that was needed; one only had to know how to look.
The dentist? He was hours away on horseback. For that reason, when a tooth would give no more peace, Aunt Caterina armed herself with courage and, with the help of a strong man who held the unfortunate one still, did what had to be done. It was not a trade she liked, but pain never waits.
No one spoke of payment. Someone would bring her a salami after the pig slaughter. Others a sack of corn, two wheels of cheese, a hen, or a basket of eggs. If a family had nothing, Aunt Caterina would smile and say that the Lord had already paid her enough.
She always wanted the women in labor near her. How many children first saw the light of the kerosene lamp in that woman’s hands! And how many times she stayed awake until sunrise, returning home afterwards covered in mud, yet happy to have saved a mother or a child.
As the years passed the road arrived, then the pharmacist, then the resident doctor, and finally the hospital. The old cures gradually disappeared, as so many things of the colony disappear.
But those who were born in those years know well that it was not only the herbs that healed.
It was trust.
It was solidarity.
It was that world where every family kept the door open for the neighbor.
And when today some old person tells of the cures of old times, he does not speak so much of the infusions or the poultices. He speaks of people like Aunt Caterina, who without studies, without glory, and without pretensions, kept entire communities alive in the hardest times of the Italian colonization of Rio Grande do Sul.
Author’s Note
This chronicle does not tell the story of one precise person, but the memory of many women who lived among the Italian colonies of the “Serra of Rio Grande do Sul” in the early years of the twentieth century. Almost fifty years had passed since the first emigrants had landed in Brazil; life had changed, but not as much as one might think.
The forests had been largely subdued. Where once there had been only great pines, cedars, and imbuia trees, now one saw vineyards, corn, wheat, and hundreds of wooden houses. The families had built chapels, community halls, mills, sawmills, and many communities that in time would become important towns.
But progress arrived slowly.
The roads were still of earth, almost impassable when it rained. The horse and the cart remained the principal means of getting about. The doctor lived far away and, in many localities, one had to ride for hours through the mountains in order to call him. Pharmacies were few and medicines expensive—things that not everyone could buy.
For that reason every community counted on experienced people: midwives, healers, herbalists, and elderly women who preserved a heritage of knowledge brought from the Veneto, from Trentino, and from Friuli. Many of those cures came from centuries of peasant experience and from a popular medicine that united observation, faith, and tradition.
Naturally not all the remedies were effective according to modern medicine. Some did good, others served more to comfort than to cure, and some, seen with today’s eyes, might even be considered risky. But that world must be judged with the eyes of its own time. When there were no alternatives, hope and solidarity became part of the cure.
That reality helped to form the character of the Italian colonies. The habit of giving a hand to the neighbor, of sharing the little one had, and of never leaving anyone alone in the face of illness has remained one of the foundations of our culture.
This chronicle, therefore, wishes to be a homage not only to the “cures of old times,” but above all to those simple women, almost always forgotten by the history books, who with their hands, their faith, and their courage kept so many families alive until progress arrived even among the mountains of the Serra Gaúcha.
Dr. Luiz Carlos B. Piazzetta
