Pioneer Medicine...Not Your Everyday Cures
 

In the earliest days of "Boca Ratone's" founding, when the first pioneers
were beginning to settle our area, the only medical care to be found
came from one's own resources.  Diane Benedetto, the daughter of
Harley and Harriette Gates, recalls in her "Early Days" memoir some
of the old fashioned cures used by her mother and other early pioneers.

For a cold, sore throat, or galloping consumption, kerosene and mashed up onions were tied up in a cloth which was placed around the neck or on the chest. When Diane cut her big toe almost in half with an axe, her mother and Dessie Douglas (wife of Lucas Douglas, the Palmetto Park Road bridge tender, and  mother of Carl Douglas, who was born in Boca Raton in 1919) washed it out with lye soap and wrapped it in an old rag. The cut healed in no time at all. 

She also remembers that if you stepped on a nail or cut your foot, you would have a salt pork poultice or one of bread and milk placed on the wound and wrapped in a rag.  Or, one could beat the blood out of the wound a little, put a penny on it and some fat back to draw out the tetanus.  It would turn the meat green but it worked - and, you lived.  For bee stings or insect bites, mud packs did the trick.  There weren't any antibiotics in those days but you could rely on the home remedies to pull you through.

Home remedies were used in both the black and white communities.  If you had a stomach ache, your mother could give you a few drops  of asafetida; this was also a cure for headaches and colds.  Palm of Christian leaves (castor bean leaves) were good to help bring down a fever.  This plant has wide leaves with five points around it and grows alongside the road and in people's back yards.  If you had a fever your Mama would put a little vinegar on a leaf and place it on your forehead to draw the fever out.  By morning the leaves were all parched and dried up, but the fever was gone and you were feeling better.

If someone was coming down with a cold, the bottle of "Three Sixes" would be brought out.  It had a lot of quinine in it and worked very well to clear the head and sinuses.  There were many home remedies used in Pearl City which was a good thing, because most of the  folks there didn't believe in spending too much money on a doctor.

By 1948 Dr. Charles Stanley Ball opened Stanley Memorial Hospital in a government built building on Palmetto Park Road and SW Second Avenue.  Unfortunately he suffered a stroke and the hospital closed down in 1950.  Dr. William O'Donnell became the town's first physician: as a seasonal doctor for the Boca Raton Club; serving in the Army during WWII; and ultimately becoming Boca Raton's first  permanent physician in 1946.