IT is a superstition, shared by all the communities and cultures of India and Pakistan that when you sneeze someone is remembering you, thinking about you with affection. It is interesting that ‘sneezing’ has exactly the opposite superstition attached to it.
Science has eliminated many such superstitions. For example, another popular superstition is that if a crow caws on the wall of your house, some guest will surely visit you. In modern big cities, no crow, no sparrow, no parrot, nothing is to bee seen in the air except big, noisy aeroplanes. In the city where I live now, all the crows have found a safe abode in the college where I teach. There are hundreds of them. They have become a nuisance for they always leave marks of their vengeance on the heads and shoulders of the people who pass under the trees.
Mike is a very colourful person and such thoughts seem to be a distorted way of studying different cultural patterns.
Ibne Hasan

Thanks for your comments, Hasan! Greek superstitions about health are quite fascinating. I was once told that I should never step over a person who is laying on the floor because his growth will be stunted and/or he will shrink! Home remedies are interesting as well. For example, some years ago when I was scheduled for gallbladder removal sugery, an old Greek man told me that the surgery was completely unnecessary and that I should simply drink one full glass of cold water with oregano mixed in several times a day because this would dissolve the stones after a few weeks. And he was completely serious! Needless to say, I had the surgery (I was in quite a lot of pain at the time) and my gallbladder contained over 100 tiny stones. I don't think the oregano would have worked. Another common "remedy" among older people in our family is a full-body rubdown with rubbing alcohol. I have heard this suggested as a treatment for anything from the flu to broken bones! I should probably write a whole article on Greek superstitions and home remedies.

Actually, sneezing has the same attached meaning in Greece as Hasan describes, that someone is thinking about you affectionately. And by means of simple numerology (saying a random number between 1-24 corresponding to a letter of the Greek alphabet), one can attempt to guess the name of the person thinking about you. Allegedly :)

Keep in mind, that if you yawn too much, then someone has given you the evil eye, and you require someone to "de-evil-eye-ze" you. A practice that, according to some acquaintances, works very well even through the telephone :)

Intersting thing about the crow Hasan, my impression is that in Greece, if a crow does this outside someone's house, it is a bad omen, usually a death in the house.

As for quack medicine, i have myself been subjected to alcohol rubbing as a child. It's supposed to cure the common cold. My parents did call the doctor and did give me medicine of course, i suppose they thought that doing this wouldn't hurt, or something.

That said, i have not been sick a single time for more than a decade, so maybe it does work ;)

It's still not as bad as bloodletting, to which my grandmothers subjected both my parents when they were young (called "ventouzes"), to "get rid of the bad blood" whatever that maybe. A remnant of Hippocratian quackery, to balance the "humors" inside the human body, though in Hippocrates's defense, he couldn't have known any better 2000+ years ago. Unlike my grandparents...

Dude, I have totally heard of the yawning thing...more than once, as a matter of fact. I have actually heard someone (who shall remain nameless) say -- after yawning several times -- "Huh...Somebody must have given me the mati." (In fact, if she happens to read this then I will likely get punched at some point in the near future) I am totally not allowed to disrespect the "evil eye" concept at my house. If I make fun of it too much, then I usually end up getting the mati cast on me! :)

I have also heard an older Greek fellow (who shall also remain nameless) complaining about how young parents take their kids to the doctor too much these days. He said, "When I lived in the village and I got sick, my grandmother would spit on me and then I was fine." In-deed.