QUARANTINE 
Lois A. Burkhart - Caroline Jones, Interviewer

We had two teachers that stayed with us, and they roomed at our house and took their meals with us. There was another teacher that stayed down the street. They went to see her one afternoon. Well, one of them spent the night with her, and the teacher took real sick in the middle of the night. Of course, Dad was the doctor, and he went down, and he pronounced it was diphtheria. Well, they quarantined in those days for diphtheria.
We were quarantined because the teacher came home, and I guess, the disease, the germs, could've been spread. Anyway, we were quarantined. Ten days, I believe it was it was quite some time, I remember. I was young.
Oh, they did everything in the world to pass the time off, these teachers and Grace. Daddy had some horses. He had a couple of them, Winnie and Minnie. They were bays. So he let them ride Winnie and Minnie, and they could ride up and down in front of our house on the road, but they couldn't go anywhere else. My Grandmother Atkinson was a Puritan in beliefs and she got word of it, and she called Dad up, and told him that he was gonna let Grace just go to the devil for riding astride. Dad said, "Ma, that's so much better than riding sideways," he said, "because that's hard on a woman, to ride sideways." I never will forget that! Then, one of the teachers would climb up on top of the windmill and look downtown because her boyfriend was working at a drugstore, and she thought she could see him! A lot of funny things like that happened.

HOME REMEDIES 
E. C. "Pete" Bouffard - Bobby Deaton, Interviewer

Mother was real good. She believed in herbs of all kinds. She made camomile tea and elderberry tea. I don't remember them all. We took castor oil in the fall. Daddy would give us a round. Everybody took a tablespoon of castor oil to tone your body for the winter, so you wouldn't take a cold. If you got a cold, Mama made a poultice out of Rawliss Camphophenique and put it on you pretty heavy, and she'd put a hot cloth on your chest or on your back, depending on where it hurt the worst. It cured. It worked good. In the spring, Daddy always gave us sulfur covered with some sugar, a teaspoon of sulfur, to ward off spring fever. I guess it worked, 'cause I'm just as healthy as a cedar post.
In my early twenties, I brought babies into the world, I sit with the sick, I held the hand of the dying, I dug the grave, carried them to it, and covered them up. I've done it all. You name it.
I sat with one old man—I think I sit with him twenty-one nights. I'd get there at twelve o'clock at night, and there was another man the other side of him. He and I would sit from midnight until seven o'clock in the morning. The old man was in his nineties, and he would stop breathing every so often. We found that by, each one of us, one on one side of the bed and
the other on the other side of the bed, reach up and get his arm and pull him forward, and set him back down, just about like the stroke of a breath—you do that anywhere from three to eight or ten times, and directly, he would sigh and go to breathing. We kept that man alive at night, twenty-one nights like that. Finally, he died. He just didn't take that breath when we pumped him the last time.
 

BURYING

Florence Yearwood Wray - Ruth A. Davis, Interviewer

At that time, if a neighbor died, your family or your friends went and dug the grave. The family went and bought the casket. You used your wagon or something to carry the dead to the grave site. At that time, they didn't have hospitals; people died at home. They didn't have morticians for many years. Usually they would buy a shroud. Some-times, I remember, they'd give Mama some of the clothes, and she'd bring them home and we'd wash them and she'd take them back and dress them, and she'd dress their hair. She was always good to do a lot for neighbors. I'm sure there were other neighbors who would go in and help, but they always called on Mama to help dress the dead.

Sometimes, if you couldn't buy a casket, the men made one, just made out of a wooden box. It was a whole lot cheaper than trying to buy one, because maybe there'd been a lot of illnesses and they didn't have one in stock. The funeral director always had a furniture store and in connection with it, he had these caskets. They were just out of pine. They just lined them with white cloth, like sheets or something. They never embalmed them, so that's why they had to bury them soon after death.