Drawing ointment. Who remembers it?

Do people still get boils?

Doesn't zinc based stuff do the same? Like sudocrem?

My mum used a sterilised needle to poke out the splinter and then she put a poultice on it too. I still use the sharp needle, but think I'll get a pot of the ointment that's been mentioned. Thank you.

I remember having a boil on my bottom as a child really painful and my mother used a police on that which worked well. I remember a rather battered small tin which she had for years. This was in the fifties.

Not on the same tack as these drawing oitments but old remedies that have been neglected and which I have found as effective as and less dangerous than the modern couterparts....

must include Potassium citrate ( mist. pot.cit) near the top of the list for controlling UTIs. My ex -hospital doctor husband said there used to be huge jars of it on the female wards in the Liverpool hospital where he worked

I found it as effective as antibiotics and keep bottles in varous cupboards ready to be diluted. Haven't called a doctor to treat my previously frequent UTIs for 50 years and consequently have , I hope, not built up resistance to anti-biotics

I remember drawing ointment, my mother always kept this handy as my brother and I always seemed to have cut and grazed knees. It always healed our injuries. I recently went into Boots chemist and asked the young lady assistant for a good drawing ointment for a cut on my arm which had gone septic and normal Germoline had done nothing. She stared at me for a few moments and said we dont sell that sort of thing. I immediately realised her generation wouldn't know what I was talking about. I showed her my arm and she gave me a small pot of Magnesium sulphate. It did the trick and drew out all the poison from my cut. It seems younger generations aren't aware this wonderful ointment.

pinkprincess

ElaineL
I can remember doing this when I was a student nurse.
Also Kaolin et Morph ointment, which as it's name shows contained morphine.

I thought kaolin and morphine was a liquid for stomach upsets? My father swore by it

Squiffy

Brilliant stuff! I use it for drawing out post-gardening thorns and splinters.

Wonderful little rose thorns are the bane of my life, I'll try it after I've pruned this year

The ointment that you may be talking about was called bazillicin ointment. My mother used to use it when we were young for splinters etc. Excellent stuff but don't think that you can get it now. Magnesium sulphate is just as good.

I'm told superglue works.

Not for splinters. But I remember having fallen over (twice) with horrible cuts and grazing to both knees including dirt and grit in the wounds and Mum using some awful yellow ointment to try to draw the grit out.
Mum was most annoyed as being allergic to plasters I ended up with huge crepe bandages round each knee and we had a family wedding to go to!!

I also remember a boil on my outer thigh. And that was drawn with regular bathing with near boiling water and pink lint. Pink lint was lint impregnated with boracic acid.

We used soap flakes dissolved in as hot water as the sufferer could stand for drawing out spinters. You sat with afflicted part in a basin of hot water.

Kaolin poultices were used for colds that "had gone to the chest" and my sister's chronic bronchitis.

Oh yes! And poultices made of soap. I was a dispenser in a pharmacy and we sold magnesium sulphate ointment!

Sugar and soap on a plaster does the trick - the only useful piece of advice my MIL ever gave me.

A straight forward plaster left on for a couple of hours softens the skin and brings the splinter to the surface making it much easier to pluck out.

Lizbethann55

This morning my DD got a splinter in her finger. It turns out that she can't cope with splinters ! So my DH had to rescue our DD by removing it with my best eyebrow tweezers, while she screwed up her face and looked the other way. ( We will ignore the fact that she is in her late 30s!) But it reminded me of when we were little, if we got a splinter " drawing ointment " was put on the afflicted part of the body. Does anyone know what "drawing ointment " actually was and whether or not it actually worked?

MAGNESIUM SULPHATE or Mag.Sulf for short it works!

Yes I remember my mum having an ancient looking tin with drawing paste in - no idea what it was called but I loved the smell! I had no idea you could still buy it, I’ve always used a scraping from a wet soap bar mixed with some sugar and held in place with a plaster, it always seemed to do the trick if my DC ever got a splinter

My mother always had a cake of the green Fairy soap by the kitchen sink. Mostly it was used for rubbing on my brother’s shirt collars before they were washed, but if we had a splinter or bits of gravel in a cut she would cut off a piece of the soap then mix it with sugar crystals and use that as a poultice.

I used to bite my nails as a child, and often had witlows. My Nan used to put hot kaolin poultices on my sore finger ( and always promised to dip my fingers into hot horseradish if I didn’t stop biting my nails).

Mag sulphate paste heat it very gently as it gets hot super quickly and pop it on the problem

My mother also did warm kaolin paste on boils..

oh yes definitely remember kaolin poultice, mum and nan had to use it plenty of times when i was young, usually for splinters in hands and legs - friends has a wooden rail outside their back door going into the back garden, they lived upstairs in a flat, so of course we all used to slide down it!

It was probably Glickons Salve. It was a stick which my mother warmed in a gas flame and smeared on to a plaster. Very effective.

My mum used something that sounded like "click ums", I never saw it written down but thats what it sounded like. It was a yellow paste and she put some on a piece of lint and warmed it by the fire then stuck it on the affected area.
Next morning a small squeeze and out popped the splinter (or the boil/pimple burst). Sounds like the same thing.

Sorry should have written sexually active.