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TURKUMAN (Page 4)  " Animal Ailments And Gipsy Cures" BBC TALK Animal Ailments And Gipsy Cures Juliette de Bairacli Levy studied animal medicine at Manchester University, but soon decided that orthodox veterinary practice was not for her. She began to treat animals with herbs and followed the gypsies' treatment, working and living with them in many parts of the world. In her BBC talk she said gypsies believed that plants can cure every animal ailment and pass their herbal knowledge down from family to family only telling it to other people in very rare cases. Her search for gypsy remedies had taken her from Mexico to Turkey, all along the Mediterranean and to North Africa, and she had obtained many herbal cures from gypsies and made numbers of lasting friendships. She began to work in England, mostly on dogs suffering from distemper, using the gypsy remedy of wild garlic roots and fasting on honey and water whilst fever was present. She cured hundreds of dogs and then turned to horses and cotos with equal success, making much use of the supreme gypsy herb garlic, wood sage and dock leaves. After Britain's cruelly hard winter of 1947 she went to the Yorkshire dales where more than a thousand sheep were suffering from an infection that was a relic of snow starvation; paralysis was striking them down and ewes were losing their lambs. She gave them garlic to check the infection, extract of meadow grasses and nettles to restore health, and black molasses, and saved nearly every animal. Her particular pride was a ewe that had been paralysed in its hind limbs for two months. Her herbs effected a spectacular cure and the ewe was standing in ten days, running rapidly in three weeks and produced twin lambs in the following Spring, GARLIC AND NETTLES In Mexico she used garlic with plugs of nettles up the nostrils to cure of sinus disease a mare condemned to be shot. In Turkey she doctored a cat which be longed to the Director of the National Bank in Symrna. The big, brindled beast with magnificent eyes had pneumonia and when Miss de Bairacli Levy saw him he had a high fever and was breathing painfully in a hot, stuffy room, saturating the cushion on which he lay with pouring sailva. She advocated strict diet, herb pills and fresh air, and after much heated discussion windows were flung open, garlic and fenugreek seed pounded into pills and all food but honey and water withheld. Five day» later she called at the flat and pussy came strutting out to greet her, his tail erect and his big eyes shining. Another cure was given on an island off Tunisia where her own dearly loved Afghan hound was attacked by a dangerous parasitical mite, minute, black and unaffected by D.D.T. and said to kill all dogs in ten days. A combination of gypsies' and Arab cures saved her hound, which she took daily into the sea and fed with crude salt in his meat — the Arab method— adding to this the gypsy medicine of garlic internally, external dusting with sand and insect powder mixture as a smothering agent, and rubbing all over with crude vinegar into which a little essence of eucalyptus and camphor had been put to discomfort the mites and destroy their eggs. The fatal eleventh day passed;' the hound lived, his mites decreased, and at the end of a month he was free and well. She was eternally grateful to the gypsy herbalist who had taught her so much, usually by a great fire of tree boughs and brush that cast a golden light around. She found gypsy life in all countries both alluring and rewarding and it had given her material for several books and enabled her to heal sick creatures of every kind. 'Seventeen years with the gypsies have caused me to love and admire this strange and little-known race of people who have preserved the precious art of herbal medicine which other wise would have become almost lost to this modern world,' she said. (Article published in the Nambour Chronicle and North Coast Advertiser, Queensland, Australia, Friday 17 April 1953 Related content Switzerland - Turkuman Tribute Pages Daruma Afghan Hounds/Ghazni US information UK - Brantwood Kennels Turkuman Nissim's Laurel Stenara Afghan Hounds Brazil Sumava Afghan Hounds, Spain Sunny Shay handling Afghans in England Branwen AKC registrations and pedigrees Links to video "Juliette Of The Herbs" Juliette of the Herbs Clip1 Juliette of the Herbs Clip2 Juliette of the Herbs Clip3 Juliette of the Herbs Clip4 Juliette of the Herbs Clip5 Juliette of the Herbs Clip6 Previous Turkuman Page |