Quarantine Chronicles Day 40: A look at some of the strangest ‘cures’ for illness

I’m on a record-breaking pace with today’s column, with this marking 40 days (and nights, in many cases) of living stranded in the desert that is my house in Long Beach’s Far East.

I’m not comparing myself to Jesus (those are your words, not mine), but I’ve now written this column for the same number of days Jesus fasted in the Judean desert.

And, in other biblical feats, I’m now tied for the number of days and nights it rained during the Great Flood.

Here’s a fun quarantine fact: The word “quarantine” comes from 14th-century Venetian Italian quaranta giorni, which translates (if I remember my Venetian Italian) to “40 days,” the period that ships were required to be isolated before crew and passengers could go ashore during the Black Plague (1347 to 1351), generally thought to be the worst pandemic in history.

I’m learning a lot in isolation now that going into the plant every day isn’t stunting my intellectual growth. Who knew that autodidacticism would be a great time killer?

Besides learning about the etymology of the word quarantine, I’ve also learned (though I suspect I might have known it already subconsciously) that drinking Lysol isn’t an effective cure for coronavirus, even though your man in the White House says let’s give it a go! What could go wrong?

And I was thinking, if you can’t trust the president, who can you trust? If it works on countertops and toilet bowls, Trump and I reasoned, why couldn’t it work on my internal organs? So I poured a couple of shots into a shaker with ice and added a little water to help release the sweet taste of Lysol and poured some into a cosmopolitan glass with a twist of lemon, and then, thank God, I saw that the company that makes Lysol issued a statement begging people not to drink it because, contrary to my sound reasoning, there apparently is a difference between tile countertops and my lungs. The manufacturer wrote in a world-wide plea, “As a global leader in health and hygiene products, we must be clear that under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion or any other route).”

What an eye-opener that was! Here, this company gets a televised endorsement from the President of the United States and rather than retool its factories to keep up with what you’d expect to be an even greater surge in sales, they look that gift horse in the mouth and tell people to ignore any bit of quackery they might pick up on the street or TV, and only use their product as directed and not swill the stuff like it was grape soda.

That was good enough for me. I poured the cocktail into a mop bucket and did my bathroom floors and wondered if I could somehow invent a machine that would shoot UVC rays directly into my viscera, because that was another presidential plan. One of these days Donald Trump is going to have a good idea. I just know he will.

Trump isn’t the Father of Bad Ideas when it comes to curing disease. We stumbled on some good ones from the Spanish influenza of 1918 in the book “Pandemic 1918: Eyewitness Accounts from the Greatest Medical Holocaust in Modern History,” by Catharine Arnold, with the quackery bit I share here from an excerpt in Lapham’s Quarterly.

One of the more conventional cures, Arnold noted, was kerosene, which was administered on a lump of sugar. Crazy, I know! Didn’t people back then know that sugar isn’t good for you?

If the kerosene (or turpentine in a pinch) didn’t work, there was an array of folk remedies that could be deployed against the Spanish flu, including asafetida, an incredibly foul-smelling (if the “fetid” part of asafetida didn’t tip you off) spice that smells like rotting onions with sulfuric overtones. It was thought that even germs couldn’t abide the smell and would move on to infect a more fragrantly hospitable host.

And then there was the time-honored cure that was used to good effect by author-poet Robert Graves’ housemaid: The leg of a lizard tied in a bag and worn around her neck. According to Arnold, she was the only person in the Graves household who did not develop Spanish flu.

Sounds goofy and seriously quackish. But if you tie a lizard’s leg in a bag and wear it around your neck, I’m pretty sure you’ll live longer than you would if you drank a dram of Lysol.