Long before the days of pills and ointments, there was another way of curing common ailments.

Gavin Havery looks at some of the more unusual, and sometimes unpleasant, remedies of times past.

FEELING under the weather? Sore throat? Runny nose? What you need is a pair of smelly socks. Tie them loosely around your neck, and see your bunged-up symptoms melt away. Or at least that's what a more traditional approach to medicine would have you believe.

"It could be that this was the olden days' equivalent of putting your head over a bowl of steaming eucalyptus and the stench of the sweat would clear a stuffy nose," suggests Carol Cooke. "It seems very odd, but many people remember this and it could be that in 100 years' time people will think things we do now are a bit daft.

"Some of the other things I have discovered would make modern-day doctors die of shock if they imagined sick people taking their health into their own hands the way they used to." One late Victorian medical manual gives straightforward advice on 'gutta percha tooth-stopping'. Translated into modern day English, this is DIY dentistry for the impoverished using a silver thimble - without anaesthetic.

It makes you wince just thinking about it and suddenly the sweaty socks don't seem so bad after all, when you consider what else people endured in search of a cure.

"People seemed to be far more abrasive in those days while dealing with their ailments and they were so casual about it - it really is amazing," says Carol, whose research on traditional remedies has been brought together in a book.

"They probably suffered in silence a lot more and they were definitely more stoic about their symptoms. I don't think they had a lot of choice and just had to get on with it. Of course it is so much easier now that we have so much information at our disposal and if you want to know about something you just type it into the Internet. Things have developed so far and so quickly in recent times."

Some of the advice in Carol's book, Old Wives' Tales: Remedies, Pills and Potions, has been passed down from generation to generation and across neighbours' fences, or recorded in crude journals as well as professional manuals.

As is the case today, some people put a lot of faith in the healing properties of certain plants and flowers, but others have very much gone the way of the old wives' tale and should be taken with a pinch of salt the size of Utah.

For instance, an obvious way to get rid of warts, it seemed, was to take a piece of meat - string if you were poor - and rub your unsightly growth with it and then divide it into the number of warts you had. Once you had done this, you would take the piece of meat, or string, into the garden and bury it. By moonlight. As the meat rotted away so too would the warts. Obviously.

Other more direct methods include burning the little devils off with a match, or freezing them then snipping them off with scissors.

More alarmingly, a publication entitled Everybody's Family Doctor advised people with warts to drink poison. Apparently small doses of arsenic are enough to see them off, but imagine how many people took an extra drop for good measure and ended up finishing themselves off - all for a few warts on the hand.

In those days, when nutritional education wasn't what it is today, one of mum's fears was her child getting tapeworms. The sickly youngster would have to be starved, then made to stand open-mouthed near a pan of frying bacon to tempt the parasitic worm from its hiding place and out of the carrier's mouth in its greedy bid for more food.

But some of the techniques in Carol's book make a bit of sense if you put it in the context of the times.

One way to tackle a painful earache was to heat up an onion, or potato, in the oven then wrap it up in a cloth before fixing it to said ear with a scarf.

"Some of the remedies are ridiculous but most of them are very sensible indeed," explains Carol, 52, cultural and creative industries development manager at the University of Teesside. "They sound mad but you can imagine a warm onion on the ear would be very soothing so it's not as bad as it sounds.

"I presume they must have worked for some people although I am sure to some extent it was more of a placebo effect. Some of the techniques used at my grandma's house were unusual but it was comforting, and sitting by the fire gave me the feeling someone close was looking after me. It made me feel much better and, even though it wasn't scientific, it worked."

"Obviously, it is not as precise as modern medicine and it is not a predecessor to herbal or alternative remedies that people are interested in now - it is just what people used to do because there was nothing else."

Carol started writing the book after a chance meeting with the editor of Sunderland-based Business Education Publishers at a party. She suggested her idea and was asked to write a few chapters.

From there her research consisted of talking to friends and relatives as well as scouring charity shops for old books to find out exactly how our ancestors used to look after themselves, or didn't as the case may be. She sees how healthcare has developed over the years and the way we approach self preservation may not be that different from our forefathers.

"People still talk to others about their ailments but now they tend to buy and recommend proprietary brands, but before that people would talk about other ways to cure them.

"In any street or among a group of people there would always have been a lady who knew how to make toffee or owned a communal tea set and so there would be a woman who helped when people were having a baby.

"It makes sense that there would be someone else who would know how to fettle a cold."

One belief that has remained is that a drop of liquor is the key to warming the cockles. Indeed, most of the remedies Carol has come across seem to contain alcohol and even her father would first consult 'Dr Haig' before entrusting any of the quacks of the day.

He would only have a tot but the frequency of the Victorians' faith in the medicinal qualities of booze makes you wonder whether people in the past weren't so much cured, as too drunk to care or remember what their problem was in the first place.

* Old Wives' Tale: Remedies, Pills and Potions by Carol Cooke is available from bookshops priced £5.95, or from Business Education Publishers Limited, The Solar Building, Doxford International, Sunderland, Tyne and Wear, SR3 3XW. Add £1 for p&p.