Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Catfish, Man of the Woods

Episode Date: September 1, 2026

All medicine is local, and little is more local to Justin and Dr. Sydnee than a medicine man in their own West Virginia. Dr. Sydnee talks about a local character named Catfish who became a sort of herbalist medicine man and how he became a bit of a sensation. Catfish's recipes: https://shorturl.at/MCRrI Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers https://taxpayers.bandcamp.com/ Midwest Food Bank: https://midwestfoodbank.org/disaster-relief/ Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinsawbones

Sawbones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. Hello, everybody. Welcome to Sawbones, Marital Tour of Miss Guide of Medicine.

I'm your co-host, Justin McElroy. And I'm Sidney McElroy. You know the phrase I've never really understood, Sid? What? All politics is local. Because, like, some is, you know? But, like, then there's, like, national and global politics. Yeah, but I think the, I think what they're really talking about is how people, like, make their political decisions, how they choose, how to, how they identify politically.

Like, what sticks and what doesn't has a lot to do with, like, what is happening right around you. Okay. So how, what do you think about this? All medicine is local. Hmm, that's interesting. Well, I don't know. Do you think that there's something there? Like, if you could just say all politics are local and somebody has to come along and justify it, well, let me just say this one.

All medicine's local. Well, I don't think, I don't think that somebody just wanted to say that and then other people had to find support for it. I think that probably the person who said it, I don't even know who said that first, meant something by that. Like, they had a thought and they were like, man, we pretend like it's about these people. big national figures, like we're voting for president, but really when you come right down to it, all politics is local. And then I would like kind of push my way in the conversation and be like, hmm, not really if you think about it because much of politics deals on a national scale and a global scale.

But what about this? All medicine is local because bodies, everybody's got one. And, you know, in a sense, it's all about what's happening inside, you know? So in a sense, all medicine is local. Like local to your body. You mean hyper-local. You mean so local, like, inside you, inside your very cells. Yeah, yeah.

Okay. Yeah. I mean, for you, your medicine is local, like, your personal. This is all by way of saying, I bring up this famous phrase, all medicine is local, because it's interestingly parallels with today's story, which is just about as local as they come here on someone. That's true. Justin, you were going through an archive of movies that were in some way connected to West Virginia, right? This is how you found this.

Yes. And among this treasure trove was a short documentary, a 30-minute documentary that was filmed in 1977 about a man named catfish. Yes. And now not catfish with like the spirit of a man because that is the plot of the incredible Mr. Limp it, basically. This is about a man named catfish, a human man with the name catfish. His real name was Clarence, if you are wondering. Yeah, that's one of those that's a pretty easy subout for a nickname. I think if you end up with a Clarence, I think you're going to try to switch that out asap.

Well, what you're also going to understand about, you need to understand about Appalachia generally, West Virginia. This is probably true about the South. You're not, whatever your given name is. Your Christian name. It's not going to stick. You're going to get a nickname, especially like in rural locations. Nobody goes by their name name. Yeah.

It's great when you get. people who have grown up through West Virginia and they just never found the moment to like switch it up so you get like vote buzz for sure yep and it's just I mean that's all people know that person by I mean I have family members like that like the name that I know them by is not in any way their name yeah so yeah and so catfish gray or catfish man of the woods Catfish Man of the Woods is probably what he's best known as, even though that's not really a name. So this is someone who is very low, like I looked up where he was born and where he lived most of his life in Glenwood, West Virginia, is like a 34-minute drive from where we are sitting right now. Okay.

So that's how close. It's up Route 2. You know. Up Route 2 near where the IGA used to be? You know uprout 2. Up Route 2. Past the Giovanni's. the Glenbyar pool, out past where the IGA used to be.

Past Lee Sage. You're going to go past Leaseach. Pass the hillbilly hot dogs. Keep on going. If you hit Point Pleasant, you've gone too far. Is that near Green Bottom? Is it a green bottom out there? You're on the way because if you're out there.

Greenbott's out there. Anyway, that's where Glenwood is, if you're curious. Route 2 is a really beautiful road. We don't talk about this enough. On this podcast? I think we talk about local road beauty plenty. No, we don't. It's also called the Ohio River Road.

because it follows the Ohio River and it's just a, I mean, it's one lane each direction road that just goes up the side of West Virginia right along. It's like the PCH, it's like the Pacific Coast Highway except for the Ohio

it's along the Ohio and it's gorgeous. It's absolutely gorgeous and if you go up route so you can get to Glenwood. Anyway, so he was a native of there. He worked some jobs and he actually had 10 children.

Wow. But the most important thing, and this is interesting about catfish man of the woods. There is the story that I found written down, especially like he has passed away, so in his obituary, like the biography of his life, as to how he got into the work that he's known for.

And then there's the story he tells. So first of all, the story that is written down is that he had some sort of accident in the workplace back in the early 1950s, and whatever it was, physical labor was no longer a great option for him. So instead, he came from a tradition in his family of herbal medicine. Okay. He said he was the fifth generation herbal doctor.

Whatever that means. Yes. And so he began going out into the woods and gathering, you know, roots and herbs and flowers that he knew had healing properties that he had taught since he was a child. And gathering them, drying them, and selling them, packaging them up. And this is what he is known for to this day. Catfish Man of the Woods. Fifth Generation Appalachian herbal doctor. And rose to fame because of it.

The packaging and selling them up was a big part of the grind, right? This guy was selling an experience, a catfish lifestyle. Yes. And I think so like when he started doing this, I think it's really important to know. I love this kind of story because when he started doing this, it was before everybody was selling herbs. I mean, to say, like, he sold specialized herbal blends that were supposed to be kind of cure all things. In today's popular medicine wellness culture, it's like, oh, so like Gwyneth Paltrow does, you know? I mean, there's no, it doesn't feel like a weird thing or a unique thing.

But he started doing this before that sort of took off, before it was a fad, before it was a trend. There is a documentary about him, and I'm going to reference a lot of information from this documentary, because it was, you know, they went and interviewed him, so it's first-person account. He says in the documentary, by the way, that he was born Clarence Frederick Gray, and that until 1936, he had 67 different nicknames. All right. All right. Yeah.

So I don't know. He does not tell you what the 67 nicknames were. No. Just that in 1942, he settled on Sassy Frass King. I'm saying Sassifras, but he says Sassyfras. So, all right. It's his nickname. So he wants.

In 1942, he's sassy frass king, but then this nickname is supplanted by a better one when, and he doesn't give us the year, but at some point, him and a bunch of guys were trying to catch catfish. And I guess he was the one who caught all the catfish. Like, nobody could catch the catfish, just him. He just cleaned out this, wherever they're, this pond, wherever they're fishing catfish. He cleaned it out, and he took him down to the DuPont plant. Yes. Yeah. And he sat out, he stood out front of the deer.

I'm imagining him in like the parking lot with the folding table. And he set up in front of the DuPont plant and he sold catfish for 25 cents a pound. Perfect. And because of that, what he says in the documentary is that the DuPont company started calling him Catfish Man in the Woods. This is in the first 48 seconds of the movie, by the way. This entire all this I just told you, he very quickly monologues in 48 seconds. It's fantastic. What he goes on to say, so there's this story that's written down that he had some sort of accident.

He had this herbal medicine tradition already in his family. It's not like he made this, you know, ostensibly his family taught him this. Sure. And so he just began to do it. What he says is that between the years of 1954 and 1961, he had 14 heart attacks. Wow. This is the story that Catfish tells. He, uh, 14 heart attacks.

This is the same cat who says he had 67 nicknames. So I don't, I don't know. 14 heart attacks. He's a colorful character. Uh, so he had 14 heart attacks in seven years. And according to catfish, the doctors gave up on him. They told him, like, I'm, we're really sorry. Listen, after, good on him, man.

After the 12th heart attack, I would have been out. No, thank you. You are a problem. You got to help thyself. I can't do this anymore. Well, he, listen, this is, if this sounds familiar to you, I feel like we've talked a lot about different, like, wellness brands. And this kind of story, I think, is pretty commonplace.

Now, I will say this is a lot earlier than a lot of these other people make up these stories. So maybe he's the original. Anyway, so the doctors gave up on him. And at this point, I will say a Native American doctor. Yes. Yes. He uses in the documentary, he uses the term an Indian doctor. I do believe he means Native American.

and I don't believe he means from India. Yes. Arrives from Durham, North Carolina with a bag of herbs, Pip Sissua. Pipsisua. Pip Sissua. And he tells him, boil this down to half the amount of water,

and then cool it, put it in a jar, take a teaspoon in the morning and in the night, and you will be cured in six months. And he talks about it too in a very magical way. like he appeared from the woods with these herbs. And so he takes the Pip Sisawa and he says it didn't cure me in six months, cure me in five. Wow.

Wow, that's one month better. And at that point is when he stepped into his role as an herbal doctor. He knew he could wait no longer. The herb life had chosen him. If you were curious about Pip Sisawa, because I was not familiar with Pipisinawa. It's also sometimes called like Wintergreen or Prince's Pine. It is a flowering plant that's probably found a little niliswiswai. of here typically.

Like we're in West Virginia. It's usually found in like the northern, northeastern part of the United States up into Canada. And it does have a long history of traditional medical use throughout several Native American tribal populations.

The word Pipsisawa actually comes from a cre word that means to break into small pieces and it's probably a reference to kidney stones. There's a thought. It has a lot of connotation with the urinary systems. So it's supposed to be good for kidney stones, kidney infections, kidney health.

And it is a diuretic. It does have diuretic properties. So if you ingest this herb, you will probably have to pee. So I don't know. I mean, you could make a connection here that he was fluid overloaded because of his heart, damage to his heart. Maybe he had some congestive heart failure. And then he began taking a diuretic, got some fluid off of him and felt better. Okay.

Maybe. I don't know that that's what happened, but I'm saying it's possible. Possible? It's possible. Five months. A long time. So because of this experience, he decided that he was going to go out into the woods. And the thing is, if you are looking for a lot of the herbal roots, leaves, things that have some sort of traditional medical use or are known commonly even today as like herbal cures, you will find them in the Appalachian Mountains. There's lots of it out there.

He lived in a rural area. Glenwood is very rural. until you can go out into the hollers and up into the hills and find lots of stuff that would have some sort of supposed medical property. So his plan, what he did, was to go out to the woods on Mondays and Tuesdays. He had a whole week structured. This was not, he was not going at this haphazardly. He was organized. So on Monday and Tuesday, he went out deep into the woods and collected all the things that he knew from his, you know, from his raising, basically had medical properties.

And then for the rest of the week, he would go out a little bit, but he tried to stay closer to home because that's when people from the community could come by the herbs. They knew he would be available the rest of the time. He said even sometimes on Sunday afternoon. Sometimes. Because he was also very religious. So Sunday morning would have been reserved for church. But he would gather the herbs and then prepare them however, whether it was, you know, cutting up roots or drying leaves. He prepares herbs.

You should see the like, they show in the documentary some of his like collection of herbs. And it is like it's, like it's a. It's huge. It's huge. And it reminds me of like if you look in like a grandpa's workshop with like the random scattering of like infinite tools and jars of this and that, it looks like that. It looks like that for plants. It looks like that for herbs and like all labeled in his own like scrawl. It is wild.

And he has like the individual herbs that he could sell one at a time and then also his own mixtures of herbs. So it depended on because you could come to him for multiple things. He's not just a salesperson. You could come to him with a medical problem. I'm having this, you know, I'm having stomach problems. I'm having headaches. I'd like to lose weight, whatever it is. And he might make you an herb concoction.

Like not cook it, but put together a bag and say this is what you need, right? So he's also the doctor. So anyway, you could show up at his house on those days. And what he says in the documentary is that if you don't see him there right away, he might be out in the woods right around the house. So you've got to honk your horn. Okay. Three longs and then three shorts. And that's how he knows.

Is somebody there for him? That's great. Somebody's there for him. Yeah. And he would then come out and talk to him and sell him herbs. He was also willing to mail them. So as word of his ability spread, he would get letters initially just from West Virginia, but as we'll go on to talk about it, it soon came from outside the state, from people saying, hey, I can't come to you, but I'm having this problem, you know, whatever, what would you suggest? And he began to mail them herbal products. So it wasn't just like, oh, you should go out into the woods around your house and collect whatever. He would put together his own herbs in a bag. and just send them through the mail to them.

And hopefully people mailed money back. Yeah. But it's a little bit on faith there. You could also, he had like regular customers who would write him and be like, hey, I need a refill of penny royal. I need a refill of ginseng, whatever. And he would put that together and send him back. He has in the documentary, you can see he has the letters all over the inside of his house that people have sent him, you know, thanking him saying, hey, your herbs work great. I feel so much better.

Yeah. And it was everything. He talks about a letter for weight loss, for arthritis, energy, stomach issues. Lots of stuff about sexual vigor. Yeah, it's a big topic for him, it seems like. Sexual performance is a common reason that he is treating somebody. And yeah, he's very quick to point out there are a lot of things that will help your sexual vigor. He does, there's also a great moment in it.

You really should watch it. It's only 30 minutes and it's free streaming online if you're curious. But there's also a point where he has the guy who's doing the documentary is asking him questions. And he points out, he's like, now there's some horseweed over there. And the guy's like, well, now what's that for? And he said, well, one time a woman came to me and asked me if it would cure rheumatoid arthritis. And I said, well, sure, horses eat it and they don't have rheumatoid arthritis. So there you go.

Now, this probably would have stayed. I mean, as funny and interesting and knowledgeable as this guy was, this probably would have just been one of those local characters that you kind of know about in your community, but that's it. Except we're about to hit the 70s. And Catfish was into just the right collection of stuff that the 70s would really embrace a guy like him. So I want to talk about how he became a bigger figure.

But first, we got to go to the Bellian apartment. bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, let's go. I was, is that anything? I like that. The medicines, the medicines that Escalimid macabre for the mouth. Catfish was about to go Hollywood, and yeah, that was the vibe I got. So in the, in the 70s, outside of, not just in West Virginia, across the whole country, it's not, I don't think it is shocking to say, we had sort of an herbal renaissance or herbalist revival.

Yeah, well, a natural, like, all. across the board, right? If you'd look to another beloved West Virginia and Larry Gross, he had his hit song around this time period, junk food junkie, that was sort of about, you know, health food and natural cures and natural, you know, that natural lifestyle and things like that. I think it's very much a hot topic. It was. I mean, you look at sort of like the hippie movement of the 60s into the 70s, all of a sudden

we're interested in sort of a return to the earth, natural, you know, healthier eating. in natural ways of living. And part of that is this renewed interest in kind of like we've talked about before, like the eccentrics. That was a medical movement that started back in the 1800s where they began to look outside of like the scientific realm for kind of bespoke cures that nature might provide and things like that. It was kind of a return to that.

We see this, you know, maybe we're missing it. I know that science is advancing so quickly and we're being able to treat and cure. things we never could before, but maybe we're missing something by not turning to the world around us. Maybe there are traditional ways that have worked and we ignored them. And so there are, I mean, that's where you begin to see like formal institutions that educate people on herbal medicine pop up, you know, schools that you could go to to learn this stuff.

Before then, it was more of like a tradition. You would hand it down in your family, but you couldn't necessarily go take classes on this and become an herbal. or naturopath or whatever sort of, you know, doctor or, you know, practitioner you want to be. And you start to see that happening in the 70s. And so as a result of that, a guy like Catfish, who's been doing it for a long time, who comes from, you know, a folk medicine tradition. Appeal to ancient wisdom, one of our classic logical fallacies. Who's got a great story.

And who is also, he happened to be into a lot of the stuff that the 70s was also into. So if you watch the documentary, you'll see, there's some people who come. to buy some herbs from him. And while they're there, he starts asking them about their zodiac signs. Yes. He was very into the zodiac. It's this amazing cross-section, because as I said, he was also very religious. He was a Christian. He went to church, and he would quote scripture quite frequently. That was part of his practice even. Part of his herbal medicine practice sometimes involves scripture. Alongside that, he also was very inspired by astrology. And so he would advise you on herbal. remedies based on your zodiac sign and your broader nativity chart. It wasn't just

what's your sign. It was, I need to know the hour of your birth and the location and all that. And I'm going to chart out all the stars and planets. And I can give you a very detailed sort of prescription. And you even see him in the documentary giving like relationship advice based on that. He's telling a couple because of their signs, the guy is going to be hot all the time and the girl is going to be cold all the time. And so living together is going to be really difficult because they're never, he basically says your only option is for you to wear less clothes and she's got to wear more clothes. And I don't know. We've made that work for over 20 years now, Sid. I mean, if we can figure it out. He would have discouraged us. Yeah. So he shows what he knows.

And it's all, I mean, again, if you've listened to our show for a long time, you'll see elements as he's talking about, you know, he's talking about their zodiac compatibility. But then he goes into what herbs they need and what foods and beverages they should consume. He talks about like with your sort of personality or who you are, hot foods are going to be worrisome at certain times and whatever and cold foods might be better for you. This is pulling together. It's really fascinating because he's pulling together these herbal folk traditions with the sort of new age zodiac moment of the 70s with a little bit of humorism is getting pulled into there.

Like you're, you know, what kind of person you're, your disposition. your humor disposition was, and a little bit of Ayurveda even kind of creeping it. It's all together. More of a traditional practice rather than just like straight allopathic. Well, obviously, it's not alopathic. Well, it's not alopathic. Certainly not that. But like you, once you bust out of that mold, right, I think you're more comfortable bringing in other disciplines.

At least that seems to be the case usually. Well, and I have to wonder because I will be completely honest. A lot of what I'm going to tell you about moving forward is because I'm, because I'm after the documentary, there are a couple more public appearances, but then a lot of it is kind of an oral history of catfish. I don't have a lot of other things to tell you about him that I was able to just source, like, here's a definitive work of everything he said and did and believed. But I have to imagine he had been inspired by some of these things as he developed his own sort of unique brand of medical practice. He was also big on nudity.

Sure. There's a whole scene where he's like skinny dipping with the document. But it was the 70s. So he becomes really popular during the 70s as people from all over begin to come visit him. He gets letters from all over. He starts talking about that, you know, his letters are no longer just from West Virginia. They're from all over the country. They're even from outside of the country. And I have to imagine it's not just the herbs.

He's very charismatic. Yeah. He's a showman. He's putting, I mean, he's, he's charming. It's, he's one of those where like it is, even if it is a griff, and you know it's a grift, you kind of want it to just go with it because it's more fun, you know.

He would have done fine if instead of being born in the, in rural Appalachia, if he had grown up on a boardwalk pitching something selling, he would have been extremely successful doing that too. To be fair,

he also would have done well selling patent medicines in the 1800s. He would have been great at that. Yeah, he would have been huge. His face and name would be on so many bottles of tonics and elixers

and tinctures. He just, he really, He seems like such an affable guy, and I will say that is supported by every single Facebook comment about what he was like, is that he was incredibly nice and generous and pleasant to be around. So this is, at the height of his popularity, is this documentary that I've been referencing Catfish Man of the Woods. It was actually 74. I said 77, but it was 74. By Apple Shop Inc. It's Apple, like Appalachian, by the way.

This has nothing to do with Apple. The fruit? No, the company. Oh, okay. Yeah. I figured you might have met when the Paul Drew's kid. No, no, no.

And you can see him doing all these things we're talking about, collecting herbs and talking about it. It also, because he became so popular, he got invited to appear on two different late shows. He was on David Letterman in 1984, and he was on Johnny Carson in 1992,

and he went on both shows with like big piles of herbs. Yeah, it's very funny. Yeah. We watched one of those appearances, right? Was it Letterman? I thought it was Carson, but maybe it was Letterman.

I watched one on YouTube after. Yeah, you can find it. find, it's hard, it's hard to find some of these, but you can look for him and you can see him with his piles of verbs. And he really, to keep up with like a late night talk show host and be a guy who grew up in Glenwood, West Virginia, it's pretty cool. Yeah. You know, like he, he's, his patter, his, his, his, he does a great job. Yeah. It's really funny. Um, there's also, I found a collection of photos of him through the Smithsonian American Art Museum, uh, that were taken by Will Indras in 177. And they're really cool, just showing him out in his national. element, collecting herbs and, I don't know, being silly, being a funny guy. But aside from all that, I really, a lot of what I was able to find otherwise about him came from Facebook and people posting in groups about like I grew up in Huntington. A lot of people will misidentify him as being from Huntington originally, which, I mean, we would take him, but it wasn't technically from Huntington.

I've been born here, maybe. Maybe in the hospital. You know, that's a few. That's a fair thing to say. You know, this would be the closest hospital. Yeah. Yeah, I think, especially at the time, I don't think there was anything closer. So that makes sense.

But a lot of people who grew up in Huntington, who were older, would have known him because he would come to the markets here and sell his products, sell his herbs sometimes. So he would set up at City Market or Sixth Street Market. He also set up at, not in Huntington, but the Milton Flea Market, which is just up the road from us, and sell all of his, herbal concoctions and then do his whole thing like talk to you about your zodiac sign give you advice yeah um everybody says that his herbs were incredibly reasonably priced he never he never overcharged he would put together like i said bespoke mixtures for you if you came up to him and said this is my problem he might say let me put you together you need a bag of this this this and this let me put it together for you and he even passed out recipes for his most famous

like his bitters yeah and i'll get to his recipe for his bitters at the end i i'll get to his recipe for his bitters at the end. I want to go through... Guarantee it would be easier to have him collect all of them. Like, I feel like he handed to you, like, ah, you know what? Catfisher, I'm just going to keep buying it from you, Bell. Yes, absolutely. I want to go through a few of the comments, because I don't, I know this isn't, and it's a little off

for... Yeah, it's like an oral history, yeah, it's like an oral history that has been accumulated through people commenting on Facebook. One person said, met him when I was about six years old. He left an everlasting impression. He rubbed a few herbs on my cousin's whart and set a few scriptures, and the war was gone in two days.

I love these stories. This was at the market at the foot of the 6th Street Bridge. Okay. There was another person who knew him who also sold herbs for him. Oh, yeah. At the Milton Flea Market and said that he told me Eunice Shriver visited him when she was pregnant with Maria. Maria Shriver's mom visited him while she was pregnant to get advice, to get herbal advice. I heard that story several places, actually.

But who knows? Who knows if that's true. Another commoner said I used to go down to the city market After it closed for the day We would sit with catfish And he would tell us wild stories He once drew a map in the dust

With a stick And he told us it was heaven And that he got it straight From the top guy So allegedly He had a map of heaven Another commoner My dad visited with him

Every time he went to the city Farmer's Market He would bring home lots of his sage advice Penny Royal tea Was one he made for When we had cold Sure made us feel better Penny Royal was a big one throughout the comments.

We went to his home several times when I was young. He gave my parents some sort of root to boil and give to help my brother who had a kidney issue. We may know what it was. We got ginseng from him as well. Gensing is huge here. You can sell ginseng for a lot of money now. Yeah. Yeah. Big market for that.

There's a big market for ginseng, and it grows wild out in the hills. And so if you know where to look for it, and you'll see in the documentary, if you watch it, he does. If you know the leaves, you can dig up the root and you can sell it for. a good bit of money. The knots, yeah, that's what it is. If you're going singing, then you're looking for ginseng. The knots on the ginseng, it's interesting because the details, it tells you how long, how many years the ginseng's been growing.

Every knot is another year. So you can look down the route to see how old this is. He says, I remember chewing on it. He said, never eat tomatoes with or without salt. Okay. And that was interesting. I found, I went down this tomato rabbit hole and somebody else clarified. he believed that tomatoes were harmful and could cause cancer, citing that animals like cows, horses, sheep, goats, and deer do not eat tomatoes and do not get cancer.

Whereas rats, mice, pigs, and chickens, which do eat tomatoes, do get cancer. So he advised avoid tomatoes. So when he said don't eat tomatoes with salt and don't eat tomatoes without salt, what he's saying is... Just don't eat tomatoes. Don't eat tomatoes. So that was a big belief of his. I didn't know that. And there was another one of these, when I was a kid, my dad, Jarfley, would go there to his place and we would talk about all the earth.

and daddy knew so much about all of it, and daddy dug the yellow root and ginseng all the time, and he boiled that yellow root when we had sore throats. So we have people, I mean, these are, these comments, by the way, are from Facebook from the last year. They're within the last year. Wow. So these are not, these are individuals who grew up

in these folk medicine traditions, who interacted with catfish, bought his herbs, whose families were also participating in these folk medicine traditions, who are alive and well today. And ostensibly may be passing on these folk medicine traditions to their children. And it was great

because these comments came from a Huntington-based group. So these are, I mean, I'm not naming names, but these are people that I know. Some of them I know. He interacted a lot with our university,

with Marshall University. There was a professor, Dan Evans, who did a lot of botany classes. I took a class from in Plant Taxonomy. And apparently, if I had stuck with plants, which I didn't,

I love plants, but I hate memorizing the names of things. And so I was discouraged. He would bring catfish in to talk about, herbal plants for some of his herbal medicine classes. I know I wish I had stuck with it long enough to be there because he occasionally.

There were several people who said that their sociology class went on field trips to his house to visit him and learn about Appalachian culture and folk medicine traditions from him. So he was connected with Marshall University in that way. My mom remembered him. My mom met him. I realized at some point that if he lived up Route 2, my mom grew up out Route 2, at some point my mom had to have met him. And she did. She said that she also met him at City Market. He would go there a lot, apparently, her and her friend Lisa.

And they were told to, her granny told her, will you buy some dandelions from him? Because I don't want you to collect them because the milk can burn your fingers. I guess if you have an allergy, it can be a skinnier tent. I mean, I've collected dandelions. I made wine out of them. I haven't. No burning. But so my mom bought dandelions with her friend Lisa off a catfish.

at City Market when she was a kid. So, yeah. The last thing I want to share is his most famous recipe. It was his bitters. And this is not, he would hand this out to people. So he wanted other people to be able to, if you can gather all this, you can make it. He called it his bitters, his tonic, or his pepper upper. His pepper upper.

His pepper upper. It's a mixture of 15 herbs, I think, in equal parts. His recommendation was that you would boil them, like put it in a gallon or basically put it in an amount of water. I think one of his recipes said two quarts, boil it down to, one quart. So reduce it by half. And then you're going to take it three times a day, three tablespoons, three times a day. And it's just going to fix what else. Everything. I will say I spot one thing on here called Spike Nard, and I'll tell you that is an edible plant. It's Barry

you can snack on. I'll learn that this week on Macquarie Family Clubhouse. Actually, if you're interested in this topic, we had Alexis Nicole Nelson, the Black Forger on our show this week. This coincides perfectly. Yeah, it's great. If you're interested, go watch that episode on YouTube. I think it was one of our best. It was a lot of fun. I love her. And so it was very exciting for me to, you know, I wasn't there.

I could imagine that I was there. But there are a lot of things. We could probably put this in our show notes or in our show thing. Yeah. Yeah. In case you all are interested, because he did share it. And I think it's cool to put that out there.

But 15 different herbs. They were all things that would grow native in the area. And they do include some things you've heard of, like ginseng, like Spike Nard, like Black Cohash. Yarrow, slippery elm, red clover. They're peppermint. There are a lot of things in there that you've probably heard of, and then some things that are maybe a little more unique. And some of those that we use even today, if you go to like drugstore shelves and buy some of their supplements and herbal medicines, black cohosh, for instance, is really popular for anything related to menopause. You will find lots of preparations out there. Probably Winnet the Paltrow sells one. I don't know. I don't know that that's true, but I feel like that she was. It sounds true when you say it. But that has been out there for a while for things related to menopause. Gensing, of course, has been a popular supplement for cognitive stuff, brain function, energy, although ginseng is also panics.

That's what they used to put in Pepsi Max to make your ding-dong bigger. Slipperylm was a common tincture. Is that a curse? That wasn't a curse, right? Ding-dong. No, that's okay. Slipperylm, you would put on wounds a lot. It was thought to be good, like, as a poultice.

But you could also use her for sore throat stomach stuff. Yarrow is I grow Yarrow. Some of the things I got excited because I can walk outside and point to them in my yard. I'm growing some of these things. But some others I'm going to have to go digging for. So this is my next plan is we'll put this recipe up. I want to find, I believe in the mountains and forests around our house, I believe I can find all 15 of these. I have faith in you, Sydney.

I have faith in you. I'm worried about Pipsisawa because I don't know that it grew. It must grow. He must grow here. Road trip. He included it. He wouldn't put it in there if it didn't grow around here.

It must. We'll do it. Let's go get some. Hey, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. Maybe you're on a road trip. Listen to all the sawbones back to back. Wow.

What a treat. Thank you. I hope you're enjoying it. Safe travels. Thank you so much to the taxpayers for the use of their song, Medicines as the intro and outro of our program. I think we saw some sawbones stickers at macquarge.com with our new logo by Matt Acht Taylor.

so you can check those totally out. And anything else, Sister? I think that'll do it. That's going to do it for us. Until next time, my name's Justin McRoy. I'm Sidney McRoy. And as always, don't drill a hole in your head. Maximum Fun.

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