Categories: Family, Mikhail Hichanski

I would like to ask you: when people were ill at those times where and how they could receive medical treatment?

At that time nobody knew what was, for example, a chemistry shop or a hospital… Nobody mentioned, nobody even spoke about it. People treated themselves. There was a man in the village of Nestserauschyna, over there, near the river, his name was Hryb. There were several… probably three houses? So there lived a man, they called him a doctor. He was called up. So he was coming, I am not sure if he measured temperature or not, he didn’t have a thermometer even. He advised what kind of herbs to drink, what unction to apply. He advised a kind of ant hill treatment of rheumatism. Well. And to drink… People gathered lime flowers, savory, wild rosemary in the forest. People doctored themselves. But you know what is interesting. I have lived so much and remember quite well, and knew each man by sight. I have never heard that anybody was ill, or suffered from, for example, cancer, had a blood-stroke, heart attack, prostatitis, AIDS. Such diseases didn’t occur, never occurred. And this old man came there and cured with those herbs. Nobody knew a thing about tablets, nobody took them. And somehow people never got sick. Such diseases never appeared. Only there was… And when men went mowing grass they all were wearing straw shoes standing knee-high in water. Onebody was mowing grass for the whole week; and didn’t take off his shoes. And nobody coughed, nobody got sick. Any pneumonia, any tuberculo... It’s a miracle, I am wondering. Why nowadays every third person has cataract, glaucoma. At that time there lived Mikalai in the village, I remember well he had a kind of eye trachoma. I vividly remember this man came and turned out his eye this way and put farina in there, I don’t remember what kind of farina. It grows in the forest, such straws, there is farina in them. So he cured his eyes with the farina. There were no drugs, no doctors. When people were threshing, for example, with a driving rope. And Mikhas Sadovskiy lived in the estate; he also did not possess any land. He... he took my elderly sister to wife. And so there was a huge board on the driving rope, he was standing on it and was speeding the horses in a circle. When he slipped down, his leg got into the gear wheel below the knee. His leg was binded up, and I was very surprised that after he was taken to Vilnius to cure his leg. I don’t know how many kilometers are there to Vilnius. So they passed Dokshytsy, Hlybokaye, Vileyka, Maladechna. There were no hospitals. And so they put up his leg in Vilnius; when he was released from the hospital they took off the plaster, and his leg appeared to be bandy. You see how the medicine looked like and this the way how people were living and surviving.