Someone recently shared a fun old book with me that contained the following:
"Now I am going to give you a prescription,—for some woods medicine,—a magic dose that will cure you of blindness and deafness and clumsy-footedness, that will cause you to see things and hear things and think things in the woods that you have never thought or heard or seen in the woods before. Here is the prescription:—
Wood Chuck, M. D.,
Mullein Hill.
Office Hours: 5.30 A.M. until Breakfast.
Rx: No moving for one hour.... No talking for one hour.... No dreaming or thumb-twiddling the while....
Sig: The dose to be taken from the top of a stump with a bit of sassafras bark or a nip of Indian turnip every time you go into the woods.
Wood Chuck.
I know that this compound will cure if you begin taking it early enough—along, I
should say, from the Fifth to the Eighth Grades. It is a very difficult dose to take at any age, but it is almost impossible for grown-ups to swallow it; for they have so many things to do, or think they have, that they can’t sit still a whole hour anywhere—a terrible waste of time! And then they have been talking for so many years that to stop for a whole hour might—kill them, who knows! And they have been working nervously with their hands so long that their thumbs will twiddle, and to sleep they will go the minute they sit down, in spite of themselves."
From "The Spring of the Year" by Dallas Lore Sharp (available to read for free at Gutenbergproject.com)
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