In the Godfather 2, why did the nurse burn a candle and put it on Fredo's chest.....and then put a glass over it when he was sick???? Is that some kind of old trick or something??? If anyone has a clue, I would like to know what that was all about......I tried to look this up in past threads, but I didn't see anything.
Thanks.

I believe it's been indicated that it's an old custom. It's supposed to help cure Fredo of his pneumonia.

Of course it was rubbish, but perhaps the old Sicilian Catholic habits said it works.
What interested me more was how movingly Vito was showing the love for his children in that scene.

Your right Enzo.....normally a tough, solid man was reduced to tears at seeing his son in pain......I have been there, I related very well to that scene.......It was a great scene from GF 2

I always thought there was some scientific basis or principle. As the fire burns up the oxygen a suction is created, which would draw on the skin and loosen up the pneumonia. Possible?

Hell, my mother used mustard plasters on us. I would have loved a candle in its place.

Yes, and one theory is that Fredo had a sunken chest (funnel chest) or pectus excavatum. The suction effect is to force the deformed (depressed) chest wall to grow outwards.

That technique was called "cupping," and it was a popular folk remedy among Southern and Eastern European immigrants to the US. You heated the inside of a glass hemisphere with a candle and applied it to the skin of the sick person. It was supposed to draw the "bad blood" to the surface, where it would be dissipated. I will bet that you can still find people who do this in various ethnic neighborhoods.

Exactly right. And some of the old school Italians would first rub hot olive oil on the area before they proceeded with the technique described by Turnbull.


Don Cardi

Actually this is coming back in popularity in Hollywood. Gwenyth Paltrow does it because it supposedly clears the body of impurities. Not something I would pay for, but whatever.

I always thought that folk remedy with infant Fredo, that instant on film, may have captured the era as well as anything FFC did in the movie. And it put the focus on family, and perhaps the uncertainty of the immigrant family in the new world. You can imagine what was going through Vito's mind at that moment...how to relieve Fredo's suffering, how to provide for my family today, how to ensure the future of my family...maybe the same questions Vito would ask himself at other moments in his life.

Anytime Gwyneth Paltrow wants to dribble hot wax on my body as a folk remedy, I'm illin' and I'm willin'!

tony b.

Thanks to everybody for your input, it does make a bit more sense to me now.
I can not imagine being a parent back then, having a baby being sick like that, and wondering if he will die, too poor to get medicine, or not having any medicine availible for that......that would have sucked!!!