Post #14: Pung Waden, M.D.

Pung Waden at home

He didn't have a medical degree, but Pung Waden was certainly a doctor. He could heal diseases with homemade remedies. He could cure the cough with a swig of pot liquor. And he could heal a broken soul just by listening to the old man's wise advice through his deep drawl.

Pung was a herb doctor, so they say, a big difference between that profession and one of a root doctor. He didn't practice voo-doo, he just knew that every plant in the ground had a reason for being there, and he oftentimes knew that reason-- like making soot from burning broom straw, then rubbing it on a case of shingles to keep it from burning.

Maybe Pung's favorite ingredient was corn. He fed the hogs he ate with corn; he ate corn just like all of us do, but most importantly, Pung made his most famous potion out of corn: moonshine. On one occasion, deputies from SLED busted Pung's still. Fortunately for Pung, one of Chief J.P. Strom's favorite fishing holes was right below Pung's house and the Chief had known Pung for quite some time. I won't go into details, but that moonshine still was operational again about a week after it was busted up.

Some who knew Pung may tell you that moonshine was his secret ingredient to all of his other cures. That a little bit of moonshine goes a long way. I won't argue with that... a little alcohol has cured several ailments of mine on occasion. But I can recall the visitors Pung would have from places as far away as Michigan and New Jersey, and I would wonder if they were there for the 'shine or the herbal remedies. There had to be something more.

Pung Waden was born on the same piece of property he would later die on, a piece of land that members of my family still own today. My grandfather was an only child, and just growing up a poke from Pung, he would often say that Pung was the closest thing he ever had to a brother. He was like a family member to all of us, and was larger than life to all of my grandfather's friends. (I can still remember his old hound "Fish Head"-- given that name because he ate the fish heads and guts of caught and cleaned bream!)

Shortly before Pung passed away, The State newspaper in Columbia did several stories on him. With the help of former political reporter John O'Connor, I dug up those articles a few years ago, here they are:
 

FOLK REMEDY PUT FLU BUG ON THE RUN Bill McDonald, State Columnist The last time I talked to William "Pung" Waden was six months ago, when I visited his rural home in Blythewood to talk about his folk medicine and cures. "Pung" is 83. Among the things he learned long ago was the exercise of charm. He's a great teller of stories and can sit for hours spinning tales of his successes. A few weeks ago I called to tell him I was sick. Maybe even needed a folk remedy. "So you want to cure the flu?" he said over the telephone, his voice as slow and deep as a bend in the Mississippi River. "Now, if you really sick, you need to go to the doctor. But I can go to the woods and make some herb medicine. I cured a heap of folks that way."

Pung doesn't charge for his folk remedies. So I won't charge for passing along his RX for flu. You simply gather some horehound and devil shoestring and mix it with the sap from some sweet gum, maple and pine trees. "Boil it all down," Pung says, then add a pinch of soda and a couple of teaspoons of turpentine. After a few swallows you'll be able to run the Boston Marathon (and probably even win). Want to try it?

Go ahead, try it next time you get the flu! I bet you don't know where to begin looking for devil shoestring or horehound though.

Then there was this profile by Mr. McDonald.

HERB DOCTOR BILL McDONALD, Staff Writer Down a dirt road a poke from the stoplight in Blythewood, a dilapidated old clapboard house sits in a forest clearing dotted with chinaberry trees. The occupants of the house and land are William "Pung" Waden, two tick hounds, a roisterous old rooster and a half dozen Duroc hogs that break out from their wooden pens once or twice a year and run loose over the rural landscape. Off and on for 40 years now, Waden, 84, has treated a variety of stomach pains, migraine headaches, rheumatism and arthritis with herbs.

"Pung, I got me a bad hurtin'," one visitor moaned one cool spring morning. Another praised a liniment and asked if Waden could give her a jar for an arthritic aunt in Orangeburg. The clapboard shack is Waden's house, his office, and, on occasion, the community's alternative drugstore. Some call Waden a medicine man. Waden calls himself an "herb doctor." Whatever he is called, Waden says he's not a "root doctor" or practitioner of African voodoo: "I don't hurt nobody," he said. "You can't pay me to put a spell on people." Some days the stream of visitors arriving at Waden's shack in their late- model Cadillacs or two-tone Thunderbirds or asthmatic trucks, bearing license tags from as far away as Florida and Maryland, are not welcomed with open arms. Such was the case one recent morning. Slumped down in a chair on his front porch, Waden gazed glumly out on the grassless yard while a rooster scurried past a chinaberry tree, flapping its wings: "I wish I felt as spry as that rooster," he said, bundled up in a pile of shirts and sweaters and wearing a tweed hat over his graying head -- an appearance which gave him the look of a gnome. In a slow, rumbling voice, which gave no sign of the pain behind his words, Waden described his present state of "de-crep-i-ta-tion." He recently broke an ankle climbing over the fence of his hog pen while trying to mend a hole his hogs had used as an escape route. "A piece of board kicked back on me and broke the bone loose from here," he said, reaching down and placing a thumb and index finger on the shinbone leading to his ankle. "I couldn't hardly walk." The bone is knitting slowly, he said, but the pain has now jumped into his right shoulder, and it's excruciating. He can't sleep at night. "Can't lift nothing, either. Can't even go to the woods and get my herbs." Thus it is that life's vexations, the ones afflicting most ordinary mortals, also can harry someone as exalted as an "herb doctor." But Waden would never consider going to a doctor. He broke into laughter at the very thought: "Why I need to do that? I ain't never been under a doctor in my life. I know what's wrong with me. I'm trying to kill myself. If I had went, the doctor woulda ripped me open. I'm doing my own remedy and curing myself." The ankle is soaked each day in a mix of turpentine, apple cider and epsom salts. Waden also massages it, feeling and pushing the bone gently with hands that look as practised as a surgeon's. By some miracle of healing, the bone is mending. Unlike some fad herb healers, Waden does not promise cures or push some miracle plant. (And he only doctors on broken bones when he's the patient, he said.) While he believes he can relieve minor aches and pains, he doesn't do any diagnosing or consider himself a substitute for a doctor. "Some folks I advise to go to the doctor right off," he said. "But a heapa times the doctor can't find it. So they come back to me." One lady came to see him because she hadn't been able to retain food for days. Everything she ate, she regurgitated. He suspected the source of the trouble right off:"A twisted gut." "I've seen it in cows, too," said Waden, who also treats livestock. "I told the lady to go to a special doctor, not an ordinary doctor." Waden's confidence in his remedies comes from experience and religious faith. "God'll cure every pain in your body. All you gotta do is trust him. He'll let you get up and travel again." He started learning about herbs when he was a young boy. His mother and his grandmother, a former slave, showed him how to gather the "lady five finger" and "ginger root" and boil them to make a broth. "It'll cure the blind staggers and high blood in a minute," he said. "It'll rush that blood down. It'll thin it out." For treating rheumatism, he gathers "the pokeweed root, the angle berry root, the slip elder root, and boil them down" to make a liniment. For treating an upset stomach, the "slip elder root works everytime," he said. In decades of healing, Waden, a first-grade dropout, has never charged anyone. If he helps someone, and the person feels grateful, "then they can make a small donation. I don't want the name of robbing a man and woman, taking their money and telling lies. A lot of people want me to put a price on it, but I can't do it." Armed as he is with his encyclopedic knowledge of herbs, Waden said he has little fear of disease or being carried away in a plague. The only thing he's ever feared is falling "over his head" into a pond of water. "That water don't know nobody," he said, "and you can't drink all of it."

Bill McDonald wrote this last one just after Pung passed away. The article includes an anecdote from my grandfather, who always claimed Pung cured him of Shingles. Missing from that story is the part where Pung and my grandfather had to chase down the rooster... climbing on top of Pung's tin roof to finally catch the chicken:

FOLK HEALER WAS SPECIAL BILL MCDONALD, Staff Writer Whatever the weather or time of day, visitors would respectfully wait outside his three-room, sharecropper house near Ridgeway. ``Mr. Pung,'' they would say to the 92-year-old folk healer who died last week in a nursing home, ``I got me a bad hurtin'.''

Pung Waden would serve the petitioners from a storehouse of herbs and roots mixed in pungent concoctions, his deep voice always rumbling with conviction. The clapboard house was his home, his office and the community's alternative drugstore. And one seldom visited when there weren't cars from as far away as Connecticut, New Jersey or Alabama. Herb doctor.Waden called himself ``a herb doctor.'' He also took pains to ensure that no one confused him with ``a root doctor'' or practitioner of ``voodoo.'' ``I never hurt anybody,'' he would say in a marvelously rich voice that sounded as if God were speaking from a clearing in the forest. ``You couldn't pay me to put a spell on people.'' Whatever he was called, Waden's advice was easily sought. Neighbors also would praise his liniments and wonder if Waden could send jars of it to an arthritic relative. ``What Pung tells you is true fact,'' a satisfied customer once told me. Cured of shingles. Waden's landlord and longtime friend, Walter B. Brown of Winnsboro, recalls the day Waden cured him of shingles with a nonherbal remedy. ``Pung cut the toe off a black chicken and rubbed the blood on my stomach. I haven't had shingles since,'' the retired vice president and lobbyist with Norfolk Southern Railroad says. A research team from the Medical University of South Carolina also visited Waden once. ``Pung knew every herb and root in the world, and he loved people to visit and talk with him about it,'' Brown recalls. Ginger root.Waden learned about herbs from his grandmother, a former slave. She taught Waden how to make a broth from the ``lady five finger'' and ``ginger root,'' for example, that cured ``the blind staggers and high blood.'' But the first-grade dropout never charged anyone. If he helped someone, and they felt grateful, ``they can make a small donation. But I don't want the name of robbing anyone.'' Armed as he was with an encyclopedic knowledge of herbs, Waden also had little fear of illness or ``being carried away by a plague.'' The only thing he feared, he told me once, was ``falling over my head'' into a fishing pond. ``The pond doesn't know me, and I can't drink all of it!'' Waden was a kind, gentle man, a friend and ``herb doctor'' whose reputation stretched across the Midlands. His healing sprang from the need of people living in poverty to make do with what they found on the land. And I, for one, will sorely miss him. Bill McDonald's column appears every Thursday and Sunday in The State.

We all miss Pung... He was a character, and one heckuva doctor!