Herbal Medicine
Most Sri Lankans know the gentle comfort of herbal medicine for many ills. How pleasant it is to eat garlic roasted over hot coals, drowned in wild bees honey, first thing in the morning, to ensure good digestion. Now this homely remedy has become a health fad among the sophisticated as western medical research has identified garlic s healthful properties, especially when combined with honey.

 Even doctors practising western medicine in Sri Lanka recommend a good coriander brew for colds and fever. Ginger and garlic were added to give extra strength and efficacy. It is such a comforting drink hot, soothing, just the thing for that aweful shivery depression that precedes a cold and flu.

 For a head cold, the sure-fire cure is a herbal steam inhalation. A mixture of coriander, ginger, lime leaves and cinnamon is boiled together in a narrow-necked clay pot. When the brew gives out a strong aromatic steam, the patient, seated on a low stool and completely enveloped in a sheet, inhales the hot, fragrant steam. The effect is remarkable and clears and soothes any clogged and aching head in a pleasant and natural way.

 One of the best-tasting herbal cures is for coughs. The juice of wild oranges, green ginger juice and sugar candy is boiled together until thick. The resulting marmalade is enough to make anyone want to prolong a cough or even invent one. Coriander and the thorny katuvelbatu, boiled together, also cures stubborn coughs. Tongue tingling tippili (Piper longums), dried and ground, a very effective expectorant, are sometimes sprinkled on this home-made cough linctus.

 Swellings and bumps caused by insect bites call for red sandalwood, ground to a paste with the juice of a lime. Minor eye ailments respond well to coriander water. Itching skin clears up with a soothing salve of margosa and bittergourd leaves, ground with lime juice. Sprains recover with a gentle rub with oil of the seeds of the mi tree.

 Painful whitlows are effectively treated with a gentle alternative to painful lancing. The whitlow is capped with a ripe lime warmed over hot coals a very comforting application for a sore and throbbing finger. For small thorns embedded in fingers and toes, the tried and tested cure is a wad of warmed, grated coconut worn on the injured place for a day or two. Most oral herbal remedies do not by any means taste pleasant especially those that have aralu, or gallnut, in the prescription. The bitter gallnut and lunuvila brew that most children here have to swallow as a purgative is quite as horrid as the nastiest mixture in the western pharmacopaiea. And when this same pharmacopaiea fails to cure adolescent acne, Sri Lankans thankfully turn to simple, natural things like fragrant white sandalwood and to the unfailing wisdom and comfort of their age-old traditional medicine.