When a typical Western European or American gets a cold, he opens the medicine cabinet to select the appropriate brand of tablet, cream, syrup, or spray for what ails him.  When a Latvian gets a cold, he peeks inside his kitchen cabinets to see what homegrown or hand-picked plant and vegetable products he can find to treat his runny nose and sore throat.

In Latvia, folk medicine has been refined to the level of a science - there are more tomes about home remedies and folk medicine at the typical Riga bookstore than there are texts on the hard sciences - and everyone loves to expound on his or her version of the best way to counteract a cold, cough, or the flu using nothing more than the natural, edible ingredients found in one's own kitchen.  (Compare this to the popular Western method of alternating sticky swigs of NyQuil and DayQuil, certainly the preferred remedy for treating a cold in the United States).  For most Latvians, these ingredients were gathered or picked in the countryside over the summer, or harvested in the early autumn months, and have been preserved in paper bags or glass jars, or packed away under heavy blankets on tiny balconies - the urban version of root cellars - since the leaves began to fall.

Most of these home remedies involve the pan-Baltic panacea: tea.  In Latvia, ancient rustic wisdom dictates that the leaves and grasses used for herbal tea be picked when the fields are in bloom, shortly before Midsummer's Eve, right after the dew dries on a clear, sunny morning, and left to dry for two weeks in a cool, dark, and draughty place.  The tea is packed away in paper bags, which allow the herbs to breathe (old sugar bags are ideal; their ubiquitous presence in Latvian kitchens isn't just symptomatic of a national sweet tooth), and then stored in a dry place until winter.  For evidence of the Latvians' high regard for the sheer diversity of pickable, dryable, and drinkable herbs, stop by any bar in Riga and ask for a regular tea.  Your waitress will roll her eyes, ask what kind of tea you want, and rattle off an endless list of the menu's many hot herbal beverages.  But this diversity has little to do with flavor; each herb has a special curative or preventative function, and, when prompted, even the surliest server will turn into an amateur pharmacist, offering her advice on what to drink when, and for what.

There is an accepted canon of tea commandments, and it goes something like this: If you have a cold, headache, or high fever, drink raspberry leaf tea (the herb contains natural aspirin).  If you have a stomachache, drink chamomile tea (strong tea for diarrhea; weak tea for constipation).  If you have a cough or sore throat, drink milfoil tea (a drink that may be enhanced by the addition of one tablespoon of honey, one teaspoon of baking soda, and one raw, whisked egg).  If you've been drinking too much alcohol, or overindulging in fatty foods, sip marigold tea (which cleans and detoxifies the liver).  If you want to clean the blood, drink St. John's wort tea (asins zalu teja, literally "blood-grass tea").  And if you want to relive pain, drink Lady's Mantle tea (rasas kreslinu teja - "dew-chair tea,") an illustration of the unique shape of the leaf, perfect for accommodating a lounging dewdrop). 

Another favorite hot beverage consists of hot water and homemade preserves -  the berries picked in late summer, mixed with sugar, boiled, and stored in glass jars in the pantry.  These berry teas may also be included in the canon of tea commandments: black-currant-berry preserves give a boost of vitamins; bilberry preserves are good for the eyes and the vision; and cranberry preserves (with a teaspoon of honey) lower a fever.

The most obvious therapeutic effect of tea, heating the body, has been sought out in another common foodstuff: mustard.  For bronchitis or a cough, a mustard plaster is made by smearing a mixture of mustard powder, flour, and water on a piece of cotton or cloth (though a pret-a-porter version is available at any Latvian pharmacy).  The plaster is then soaked for a few seconds in warm water and applied to the chest and back, between the shoulder blades, where the mustard heats the area, improves circulation, and relieves congestion; the mustard plaster should be removed after two to three hours, when it has cooled.  Mustard plaster is too strong to be used on small children, and is therefore adulterated with a mixture of skudrspirts (literally "ant alcohol", also available at pharmacies), olive oil, and honey, in equal parts, which is smeared on the plaster before it is applied to the child's skin.

Mustard is also the essential ingredient in a mustard footbath, another popular Latvian home remedy for treating a cold.  Add the mustard to a tub of hot water (here you can even use a few dollops of the Dijon in your refrigerator, though mustard powder is preferred) and soak your feet in the water, increasing the temperature of the bath until your skin is as red as a lobster's shell.  When you can't stand the heat any longer, immediately remove your feet, put on a pair of woolen socks, and go right to bed.

Sleep, of course, is another universally acknowledge cure-all.  But the Latvians have passed down a few wise instructions for how to nourish the "chief nourisher in life's feast" and improve your slumber.  One involves stuffing a pillow with dried ferns, picked over the summer.  Another dictates filling your pillow with dried hop buds  - the same stuff used in making beer - or dried rose petals.  And before going to bed, drink a mug of meadowsweet tea - nature's NyQuil - and you'll be knocked out until morning.

Two of the most abundant food products in a Latvian's kitchen, potatoes and eggs, are also used for their unique heat-retentive properties, and may be employed as natural heating pads.  When suffering from a cold, an ancient Latvian folk remedy calls for wrapping a hot potato or hard-boiled egg in a thin cloth and placing it onto the chest, back, throat, or nose, to heat the area and relieve stuffiness or congestion.  Sea salt may also be used: simply heat the salt in a pan (without oil) and place the hot salt into little cloth bags, which should then be applied to the affected areas.  When coupled with a clove of garlic tied in a string around your neck (the aromatic oils clear up a stuffy nose), or a cabbage leaf fastened to your head with a handkerchief (to cure a headache), you'll find yourself a walking, talking Latvian dinner.

No Latvian kitchen would be complete with a bottle or two of vodka in the cupboard.  But vodka isn't just stored in case a friend happens to drop by;  snabis is also used for medicinal purposes.  (Isopropyl alcohol is not sold in Latvian pharmacies; pure ethanol, or spirts, is only available for sale in certain dark corners of the Central Market; and the closet thing to what is defined by the United States Pharmacopoeia and the British Pharmacopoeia as "rubbing alcohol'' is the aforementioned skudrspirts, "ant alcohol", which contains seventy per cent ethyl alcohol.)  When suffering from a high temperature, soak a towel in vodka and rub the skin to cool down the body.  When using this method on children or babies, dilute the vodka by half with water.

Using vodka to treat your sick (and garlic-necklaced and cabbage-leaf-hatted) baby can be trumped by another common therapeutic practice in Latvia: using turpentine to treat your sick child.  Turpentine, obtained from pine resin, is better known as a solvent, or paint-thinner.  But terpentina ziede (Unguentum Terebinthinae, or turpentine ointment) is available at any Latvian pharmacy, as an over-the-counter medication.  Turpentine ointment is rubbed onto the chest, back, and feet, warming the area and easing breathing.  This calls to mind the origin of the English term "pharmacy", the Ancient Greek word pharmakon, which can mean both remedy and poison.  A substance's function as either a poison or a remedy is a matter of dosage and application, or how the substance is practically interpreted (or translated) by the person administering it.

Many of these popular Latvian therapeutic methods are what young people in the United States and Western Europe would refer to sardonically as "granny wisdom," a sphere of old-fashioned and quaint knowledge that includes methods still widely practiced and appreciated, however anachronistically, by twentysomethings in Latvia, who combine a respect for the grandmotherly "old ways", with ultra-modern habits: nightly clubgoing, an obsession with luxury automobiles, and marathon sessions on social networking Web sites.  This coexistence of the old and the new is one of the things that make Latvia such a fascinating place.  But if the current trends in the United States and Western Europe are to be taken as forecasts of things to come, and they frequently are, then traditional Latvian folk medicine will go the way of novel-reading and home-cooked meals: relics of the past deemed ineffective and hopelessly old-fashioned, and replaced by more "modern" practices, which ultimately involve proprietary brands.  Hopefully the passage of time, and the natural shift in tastes and preferences between successive generations, won't bring with it an eradication of the ancient therapeutic wisdom that has been healing us for centuries, and which usually requires nothing more than a few of the common food products found in the home kitchen.