Sucking the venom and dragging the chain – folk cures that came and went

Sydneysider: A personal journey

Back in the early 1960s, when I was in the school cadets, we were issued with a little snake bite kit. The most important bit was a red plastic cylinder that unscrewed to expose a tiny, rather blunt, blade. If someone was bitten you were supposed to tie a tourniquet very tightly around the affected limb to stop blood moving towards the heart, then slash the victim’s flesh through the two puncture marks and suck out as much blood and venom as possible. There was also a tiny bag of potassium permanganate crystals you were enjoined to sprinkle on the wound to help neutralise the venom.

One was supposed to act ruthlessly to save a life but nowadays the whole procedure is thoroughly discredited. Every aspect of it is regarded as either useless or dangerous to the victim and the first aider. Snake bites are actually incredibly rare. I’ve had many encounters with venomous snakes in the bush around Sydney and only once got an aggressive response.

And then there was the Great Car Sickness Epidemic. In the 1950s and early ‘60s,when car ownership started to skyrocket, car sickness was a widespread phenomena. It involved nausea and vomiting. I remember, as a child, several incidents when the driver had to stop while a passenger got out and threw up.

The ailment was commonly attributed to a build-up of static electricity in the car. Everybody knew about cars and static electricity because everybody had got a shock from touching a car door handle in hot dry weather. It was a short leap to the static-causes-car-sickness theory.

As a cure, motorists started fitting a short length of chain to the rear bumper – just enough to touch the ground for a few centimetres. The chain dragged along the road and supposedly earthed the car. Of course it was also noisy and, bouncing along the road, emitted a shower of small sparks. The authorities even worried that these sparks might start bushfires.

There’s always somebody eager to make a buck from any half-baked theory so the do-it-yourself chain solution was inevitably replaced by commercial products. Some consisted of a special rubber strip about two centimetres wide embedded with wire, others were simply a rubber strip with a high carbon content. Either way, they were quieter, didn’t send off sparks and supposedly discharged the static electricity. You can still buy products like this, but it’s been decades since I’ve seen one actually fitted to a car.

Maybe the “solution” had a placebo effect in some cases, but recent science subsumes car sickness under motion sickness and attributes the illness to a quite different cause. This from Wikipedia: “Car sickness results from the sensory conflict arising in the brain from differing sensory inputs. The eyes mostly see the interior of the car which is motionless while the vestibular system of the inner ear senses motion as the vehicle goes around corners or over hills and even small bumps.”

The giveaway, which was noticed almost immediately, was that the driver never got car sickness (and the front seat passenger, almost never). The driver was always looking at the road ahead and was little aware of the car’s interior.

On the web, you’ll see car sickness described as “common” but in the last 40 years I can’t recall knowing a single person who suffered from it. What was, transiently, a very common ailment has all but disappeared. Why did it appear in the first place?

My personal theory is that, before the 1950s, when the car became an almost universal family possession, most people grew up with little exposure to the type of motion experienced in cars. They often travelled on trains and trams, but the experience was smoother, and there was none of the rapid acceleration and deceleration, nor the bumpy ride, nor the tight cornering of motor vehicles.

Suddenly, over a few short years, kids and adults who only travelled in their rich uncle’s car twice a year, and certainly not for long distances, were exposed to an experience for which their bodies had never been prepared. And then too, back then, car suspension was pretty agricultural, and so were the roads. The rapid improvement in car design no doubt made things easier.

In 1948, right after my father got out of hospital, he bought a big forest green Ford V8. Cars were still on ration, but as a war veteran with restricted mobility, dad was able to move up the list and purchase one without paying sales tax. Even so, it took a personal confrontation with the transport minister to get the permits actioned. As soon as I was born, in October 1948 I was being driven all over the place, including long trips up and down the coast.

From the late 1940s onwards, increasing numbers of kids were almost brought up in cars. I was one of them, and I never suffered from car sickness.