Benign Remedies

1755. Monday, April 7 (Wednesbury).—I was advised to take the Derbyshire road to Manchester. We baited at a house six miles beyond Lichfield. Observing a woman sitting in the kitchen, I asked, “Are you not well?” and found she had just been taken ill (being on her journey) with all the symptoms of an approaching pleurisy. She was glad to hear of an easy, cheap, and (almost) infallible remedy—a handful of nettles, boiled a few minutes and applied warm to the side. While I was speaking to her, an elderly man, pretty well dressed, came in. Upon inquiry, he told us he was traveling, as he could, toward his home near Hounslow, in hopes of agreeing with his creditors to whom he had surrendered his all. But how to get on he knew not, as he had no money and had caught a tertian ague. I hope a wise Providence directed this wanderer also, that he might have a remedy for both his maladies.

The Journal of John Wesley