My wife’s family remedy for whatever ails ya was equal parts honey, lemon, boiling water and brandy. It either fixes you up or knocks you out. Maybe both, but you don’t find out until later.
Bear in mind that US laws regarding alcohol possession and consumption are completely different from other common law jurisdictions. We’re pretty crazy about this shit.
My mother admitted this to me recently. When I looked it up and told her it was an opiate she quickly changed the subject 
All of my grandmother’s home remedies involved alcohol in one form or another. Except of course for constipation. You did not want to give that woman any reason so suspect you weren’t regular. 
Still in over half the states it’s actually legal for parents to let their children* drink alcohol in private at home as long as it’s not to excess. Even if there’s no specific exemption written into the local law consumption/possession for bona fide religious purposes is legal everywhere due to the First Amendment. And you can buy children’s cough syrup containing alcohol freely over the counter in every state of the union.
*Yes it’s completely absurd that a 20 yr old is considered a child for these purposes.
It’d probably be illegal now in the UK- you can’t give a child under 5 booze here, (unless you’re a doctor, in certain circumstances), though it does raise the question of where exactly the dividing line is drawn between alcoholic and non-alcoholic.
I think if it’s under 0.5% abv you’re ok, as that’s what brewed soft drinks sometimes have on (less than 0.5%) but I can’t find anything definite about where the cut-off actually legally is.
If you can find it. Every one I’ve seen in the last 10 years is alcohol free. They use glycerine and propylene glycol as solvents now.
Unique needs no modifier.
We got that too, on the advice of our mother’s father, who was a practicing pediatrician from the early 30’s though the late 80’s.
It’s tincture of opium, same as Laudanum, only much weaker (and with additional stuff like camphor). So, we got alcohol AND opium! We hated the taste, though. She used it more as a threat sometimes, to see if we were really sick. If we weren’t, we refused the Paragoric.
Thank goodness she never heard of asafoetida!
I still have fond memories of my maternal grandfather giving me a sip of his beer when I was five or six. No harm done.
I wish I’d had such enlightened parents as the OP when I was sick as a child. 
Well, no sense in wasting the good stuff on kids who don’t appreciate it.
My father used to swear that a little bit of booze (and I can’t remember which kind it was, now) was the best remedy for a sore throat. It might very well have been whiskey. We didn’t like the taste of it, and would only take it when nothing else worked. I know that his mother rubbed whiskey on teething babies’ gums, in order to soothe them. Again, it was only a tiny bit.
Nowadays, I can appreciate good whiskey, though I prefer tequila and rum.
Ah, illegal or not, a hot toddy makes things better. I’m home sick today, and last night I had hot milk, with some brown sugar and cinnamon, and a very healthy slug of whiskey in it. I’m still sick, but it made me feel warm and comforted, and helped me sleep. If I had a child, I’d probably give them much the same concoction, but with a wee bit less of the whiskey.
We spent two weeks in Ocean City, NJ every summer for our vacation. One year, one of us was sick (or maybe all 4 of us, who knows) and my parents sought the advice of a local family doctor. He gave my parents a choice- he’d write us a scrip for something or other, or they could just add some sugar/honey/syrup/something sweet to a glass of warm whiskey, and have us drink that. My parents chose the latter, and it worked like a charm.
These days, whenever I start to feel the telltale chills, sweats and feverish symptoms, I have my wife make me a hot toddy. Pound that sucker down and go to bed, and usually wake up the next day feeling loads better.
Yep, same in my family (although it was my dad, or one of my aunts or uncles). My parents did the whiskey rubs for teething, too.
I also technically had my “first beer” when I was six. (My mom let me have about half a cup when some relatives came from out of town, so I could feel included. Ahhh, the good ol’ days.)
When I was a teenager, I once had an episode of menstrual cramps so bad my grandmother went next door and borrowed some whiskey from my uncle (for me, not her!) I thought it was strange because she was ordinarily death on drinking, but it really worked.
Been treating cramps that way ever since, and experimenting with pre-emptive doses as well.
I was allowed to have a very small glass of wine with special dinners (family gatherings, celebrations etc) from age about 8 and over. I usually only sipped it a bit. There was one wine that I did enjoy, because it was so damn sweet. It was a large bottle, and inside it was a little tree, covered in hard sugar. But even that, I had no interest in drinking more than a few sips worth of. This was in South America though.
Completely took the mystery out of drinking for me, and I thought it was so weird that my teenage friends in the U.S made such a big deal about getting booze and getting drunk.
I was all like ??? I’d rather play video games, or go out to the movies with the hot girl from home-room.
I was also given Paregoric as a child when it was sold over the counter . According to Wikipedia, it is still available by prescription. The flavor was anise–although I remember it as being almonds.
In the 50’s Paregoric was probably in every home. It had a wide range of uses, and it worked. In the 50’s there just wasn’t much to get you through a lot of illnesses. But today, even OTC drugs do a better job without worrisome side effects.