Pandemics highlight alternative fixes from around the world. During the 1918 Spanish flu, faith healers in India molded human figures with flour and water and waved them over the sick to lure out bad spirits. In China, people went to public baths to sweat out evil winds and smoked too yin qiao san, a powder of honeysuckle and forsythia to fight “winter sickness.” In the west, claiming the flu “an exaggerated form of grip,” Hill’s Cascara Quinine Bromide promised relief, while a Nova Scotia man recommended fourteen straight gins in quick succession. Read more about the deadly Spanish flu pandemic a century ago in On the Shore, a tale of conflict between generations in a Lower East Side immigrant family (see NOVELS).
