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Hello, my name is Ben Samson. I am originally from Petit-de-Grat and I come from the Samson branch called Les Zayouche. Each of the different families in Petit-de-Grat have nicknames, there were so many Samsons, and Boudreaus, and Landrys, that each one had a particular family name. On my father's side, I have a Zayouche nickname and on my grandmother's side, it was a Qu'a tout. Qu'a tout is a deformation of "qui a tout", which was the, one of my grandfathers apparently was well off and, that apparently didn't come down from generation to generation, so now we have to work for a living. Our community has been involved in natural medicine for a long time. The Acadians in the area have used natural products to heal certain wounds, ills, aches and pains as we find today in natural medicine, but we've been doing it for a long time. Certain products like mustard poultices, herring poultices, onion, bread, potato had been used to heal certain aspects of general health. Another aspect of the cataplâme that was kind of a tradition in the area was the, what part of the body is involved in English, I'm not exactly sure but it's called "lever la palette de l'estomac" and it's lifting the, a certain part of the torso. There was a person in the community, I will not name him, who was very famous with his little kit. He used to go around from house to house to raise the "palette de l'estomac" of the people that had the problem. His kit included a candle, a glass and a 25 cent piece. What he used to do was place the 25 cent piece in this particular area, then put the candle on top and with the glass while the candle was burning, put the glass on top of that and eventually what it would do would be to take up a piece of the skin that would go into the glass and he would have succeeded in raising the "palette de l'estomac". However, I've heard that this person would do this more frequently to women than to men. He had many more female patients than he had male patients. Don't know why but we'll just leave it at that. Another aspect of the poultice or the cataplâme in our community was when they used to tie people to the beds. They used to wrap them around with a certain length of material, wrap them as tightly as they could and apparently this would cure a depression. After several days of being wrapped in this tissue or material for as tight as possible, I guess people would immediately get out of it and say well, I'm not sure which is worse, the depression or this, so I think I'll live with what I have. Men were often healed in a different way. The healer, we'll call him the healer or her the healer, whatever it was, would have two lead balls that they would place on each side of the testicles of the male and then they would wrap the testicles tightly in the material. Afterwards, they would tie the person to the bed. One of the stories I hear is once they had done this to one person and after they released him, he would disappear for two days never to be seen for those two days, he was apparently healed quite well and I have no reason to believe otherwise. However, that's, as you see, natural medicine has been part of our community for a long time, but I won't give you the recipes for these poultices. You have to come and visit us in order to find them out, and you come and see me and I'll tell you who the people are that have the recipes.