THEIR TOP PRIORITIES - Martin Seppala
New Ipswich Historical Society
FINNS: An Oral History of Finnish-Americans in New Hampshire’s Monadnock Region
Excerpted from FINNS: An Oral History... by Patricia Kangas Ktistes, 1997, all rights reserved.
Martin Seppala
A state-of-the-art sauna: my father made sure we had nothing less on our farm. You bet. The first saunas in America were smoke saunas. My dad, like so many others, came up with a system that had a chimney and after you heated the stones up, you could close off the chimney. And so our sauna was not a smoke house. The beveled pine paneling on the finished interior of the sauna: my dad cut the trees and did the beveling himself. I’ve thought of this many times and said, “Wow, what a man he was.” He made it on a bench saw powered by a tractor that had a pulley on it. When I was a little boy, the sauna was quite a ways from the house. And if you were the first one to use the sauna, the benches were real, real cold. After heating the stones, my father would shut off the chimney and the stones would warm up the building. So the rocks could be red hot and the building still be pretty cold. Once we were the first ones in there, all four of us brothers. And one of my brothers said he wanted to warm up the benches, so he took hot water from the barrel and threw it on the benches. And I jumped into that boiling water. My whole leg went in there. And I started crying and I ran through the snow and ran into the house. And this is the part that I remember was so different about the Finns. They had their own remedies. And I remember my mother saying, “Boy, a bad burn like that, there’s only one thing to do.” They went and got cow manure. Absolutely. Got cow manure and wrapped my whole leg in it. Now today they can say what they want, but it cured my leg. I had no infection, no problems, no scarring.
Today they’d tell me it was full of germs, but I know my mother did that whenever anyone had a serious burn. They’d go get some cow manure, I think it was older cow manure, and put it on you. And sometimes the Finns would use salt and sugar mixed together for cuts and wounds. This was for an open wound, and I think my mother might have used that, too.
Not sure I would use cow manure on a burn, but I can understand how it might work. One of the courses I taught was Immunology. The skin is occupied by 'good' bacteria that works with our immune system to fight 'bad' bacteria. A burn would temporarily wipe out the resident bacteria and give foreign bacteria a chance to take hold. Cow manure bacteria has less harmful bacteria than soil bacteria for example, and could prevent 'bad' bacteria' from occupying that same space. However, I would recommend an antibiotic salve instead.