Moldy cheese

While en route to Maui, I did some reading. After devouring the book Maui for Dummies, I began reading Dutch -- A Memoir of Ronald Reagan.

In the Reagan book, I ran across an interesting piece of trivia about his mother. When President Reagan was a boy his mother contracted the Spanish Flu, which at the time was killing scores of people in nearby towns.

Her condition was so bad the family thought the doctor was going to confirm she would die from the illness.

For the rest of the story, here's a snippet from the book:

Instead, he prescribed rotten cheese. Whether or not this amounted, as (President Reagan) later surmised, to primitive penicillin, (his mother) recovered and (his father) was saved from grief.