Medicine: Poison-Ivy Cure

Two soldiers discreetly retreated when a strangely dressed figure emerged from the woods near Fort McPherson, Ga. Clad in heavy garments, with goggles and big asbestos gloves, he toted a bulging burlap sack. Even technicians at the fort's medical laboratory shrank back. "Unclean, unclean," said one of them. "Phooey," replied Sergeant Seymour Shapiro. From his sack he pulled one of the long, leafy, hairy-stemmed vines of poison ivy he had been gathering, cut the vine into 3-ft. lengths and hung the pieces in bundles, like curing tobacco, from the ceiling.

From dried poison-ivy...

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