Emergency
Home Remedies for Smallpox

The following information is reprinted from the Fourth Edition of our book, The Natural Remedies Encyclopedia. In a terrorist crisis, you might not be able to reach a physician and all the hospitals may already be full of patients—so you will have to care for your sick at home. Therefore, the following information is provided here. But, if at all possible, you should go to a physician!  

SMALLPOX­(Variola)

SYMPTOMS—It takes 12-14 days for the disease to develop after exposure. Several days of discomfort is followed by a severe chill, intense headache, terrible pain in the back and limbs, vomiting, fever, loss of appetite, and sometimes convulsions.

Then the fever lowers and the eruptions appear. The pain disappears, but the highly contagious disease can still be given to others.

The rash of smallpox initially consists of hard red papules, especially on the forehead, neck, and wrists. They gradually fill with clear serum, becoming vesicles, which become depressed at their centers and then fill with pus (called pustules).

CAUSES—Unsanitary living conditions and poor diet. The disease is highly contagious.

NATURAL REMEDIES

Call a physician.

• Keep the sick person in bed with the windows darkened, yet maintaining ventilation and an even, moderate temperature of not over 70° F.

• Put him on a fast of juices. During the fever stage, give him plenty of lemonade without sweetening.

• Give high herb enemas and clean out the bowels. But, during the second to the fourth day, while the skin is producing the eruptions, do not meddle with the stomach and bowels. Give no emetics or strong purgatives during that time.

• When the skin is hot and dry, give him fluids every hour until there is free perspiration.

•  When the skin is hot and dry, place equal parts of pleurisy root and ginger (or equal parts of yarrow and valerian) in a cup of boiling water, steep for 20 minutes, give a cupful every hour or until there is free perspiration.

• If the fever rises above 103° F., reduce it by means of tepid sponges and tepid enemas. Give a wet sheet pack, which the patient warms up. Until the temperature lowers sufficiently, change it as soon as he warms it up.

• If there is pain in the back and legs, hot fomentations can partially relieve the pain.

• If there is itching of the skin, bathe him with goldenseal root tea, yellow dock root, or burdock root. Another formula: Mix 1 oz. goldenseal and 9 oz. flaxseed oil, and apply freely as needed.

• If the extremities become cold, warm them with hot- water bottles.

• Use the same remedies on the second fever as you did on the first, with the same good results, if the first has been properly managed.

• Open the pustules by pricking with a sterilized needle, about 4 days after they come to a head. Then bathe them with hydrogen peroxide.

• Bathing the pustules with goldenseal tea will often keep pitting from occurring. Another formula is to mix goldenseal with Vasoline and apply to the pustules, to keep from pitting. Yet another formula is bathing the skin with a tea of yellow dock root and goldenseal.

• During the fever: Give no food, except wheat-meal gruel; however, do not do this unless the appetite calls for it.

• Follow with a light diet of vegetable broth, oatmeal water, and fruit juices.

• Prevention: If there is danger of exposure to smallpox: Obtain adequate rest, eat carefully and lightly of good food, and cleanse your system with high enemas.

• To short the course of the disease: Hot baths, taken before or after contracting smallpox will make the skin active and shorten its duration.

J.H. KELLOGG, M.D., PRESCRIPTIONS FOR SMALLPOX AND ITS COMPLICATIONS

GENERAL—Spare and aseptic diet and water drinking. See “Scarlet Fever. Build General Resistance.”

LUMBAR (LOWER-BACK) PAIN—Fomentation or Hot Trunk Pack every 3 hours; Heating Pack during interval between, changing every 30-40 minutes.

NAUSEA AND VOMITING—Ice Bag over stomach, Hot and Cold Trunk Pack.

CONSTIPATION—Cold Enema, daily, and colonic at 70° F. daily.

DIARRHEA—Enema at 95° F. after each movement, Fomentation to abdomen, Cold Compress to be changed every hour.

DELAYED ERUPTION—Hot Blanket Pack or Hot Bath followed by Sweating Wet Sheet Pack.

FEVER—Graduated Bath, Prolonged Tepid Bath, Cooling Wet Sheet Pack, Cool Enema (with simultaneous Fomentation to back if necessary, to prevent chill), and large Cooling Compress.

STAGE OF SUPPURATION (PUS FLOW)—Prolonged or Continuous Neutral Bath.

SWELLING OF FACE—Hot Compress to face, for 5 minutes every hour, and Cold Compress during intervals, at 60° F. and renewed every 20 minutes.

PITTING—Cooling Compress, using red cloth and covering face completely. Also need red curtains on the windows.

HEADACHE AND DELIRIUM—Ice Cap, Ice Collar. Hot and Cold Head Compress.

CONTRAINDICATIONS—After  the  eruptions  appear, avoid the Wet Hand Rub, Cold Mitten Friction, and all Friction Baths.

GENERAL METHOD—Keep the temperature down and maintain activity of the skin by Prolonged Neutral and Tepid Baths. Aid elimination by copious water drinking. Prevent visceral complications by continuous cold to the head and the frequently changed Abdominal Compress. In confluent cases, general septicemia is prevented by Prolonged Full Baths.

Here is additional information on the possible treatment of smallpox, if you have no access to medical care. It was written by a natural remedies physician:

If hygienic care had been resorted to in the beginning of smallpox, no complications would have occurred and there would rarely be a genuine pustule. With hygienic management the disease would not have to progress to the second stage with pustules or a second fever. It would only become pustular if the individual prevented drainage of the vesicle and continued eating a heavy diet. The vesicles containing the unwanted debris that was in the organs and tissues would burst. The clear fluid containing the toxic substances would flow out onto the skin. Frequent warm sponge baths would wash away all the poisonous debris. The inflammation of the skin would heal and that would be the end of the disease. There would be no horrendous pustules or other complications brought about by the medications. If individuals kept themselves clean, and did not take off the scabs until they fell off naturally, there would be no unsightly pockmarks. People are always too anxious to pull scabs away. To do so is to expose the lesion to the atmosphere before the skin has completely healed below it. The skin then has to quickly heal over before it has completed restoring the underlying tissues. This, naturally leaves a pit or scar. The extensive boils and gangrene that regularly occurred would not have taken place had no corrosive drugs been used.

If you think those symptoms are bad, and that we do not use any medicine so lethal as corrosive sublimate and carbolic acid today, you’d better rethink the problem. Today’s drugs are even more lethal because they are designed to be easily absorbed, spread to every tissue and cell in the body, and kill cells all over the body. Do not put your hope in medical “care.” The only care you need is a healthy body and to let it do its thing.

You do not have to fear smallpox (even if you should develop it) as long as you immediately quit eating, go to bed and rest, and drink pure water only when thirsty. Smallpox is a disease of the bon vivant, epicurean, who overeats on a daily basis and especially on animal foods. The condition of enervation is built by anyone who does not secure sufficient rest and sleep to permit the elimination of endogenic and exogenic toxins, and for the restoration of the nervous system. Once the stage of enervation is established, digestion is further impaired and the body is flooded with fermentation and decomposition products from the intestines. This is what is called Toxemia or Toxicosis. Toxicosis makes it exigent and imperative that these toxins be eliminated immediately by extraordinary means, such as through the skin.

Every single cell in your body is capable of eliminating and destroying various microorganisms and their waste products, as well as man-made organic products. But most man-made products are more toxic than those made by bacteria; and they cause more damage than bacterial waste products. It can be disastrous when the body is overwhelmed by substances that do not belong inside it and which the body cannot use under any circumstance of life. And this is what happens when diseases are “treated.” Your body is inundated with toxic substances and it may drown.