Weird Historical Medicines That Are Better Left In The Past
Today, we can rely on doctors and sophisticated medicines to help us when we’re sick. But our ancestors weren’t always so fortunate. In ages gone by, “doctor-approved” treatments ranged from the kooky to the downright bizarre, and often medicines were even more deadly than the conditions they were supposed to treat.
Electric-shock therapy
John Wesley is best remembered as the founder of Methodism. But he had another string to his bow: he refined the use of electricity as a medical treatment. The practice was known as Franklinism in recognition of Benjamin Franklin’s pioneering work in electrical research.
Wesley gave patients mild doses of electricity for a range of conditions from deafness to gout and from blindness to toothache. In 1760 he even published a learned work on this subject, grandly titled Desideratum, or Electricity made Plain and Useful by a Lover of Mankind and of Common Sense. The great man ran free clinics offering electricity treatment in London and Bristol.
Corn flakes to improve health
As you pour some milk over your Kellogg’s Corn Flakes in the morning you might think that all you’re doing is squaring up to an everyday breakfast food. But that’s not what vegetarian and Seventh-Day Adventist Dr. John Harvey Kellogg thought. Helped by his brother Will, he was the man who had brought the breakfast cereal to market in 1906.
Kellogg believed that his golden flakes were more than just a handy breakfast food: he thought that eating his product would actually improve health. In his 1895 patent application, Kellogg stated that his corn flakes were “particularly well adapted for sick and convalescent persons.” A persistent internet meme claims that Kellogg’s Corn Flakes were marketed as “anti-masturbatory.” Entertaining, but entirely untrue.
Abracadabra to cure malaria
Quintus Serenus Sammonicus was a Roman doctor who tended to the Emperor Caracalla. Unfortunately he got on the wrong side of his eminent patient, who had him executed in 212 A.D. But before he died Serenus gave the world a book titled Liber Medicinalis which included an intriguing cure for malaria.
Serenus’ malaria cure contains one of the earliest uses of that popular magic word “abracadabra.” According to Serenus, malaria patients should write the word down. Then they should write it again, leaving out the last letter. This process of omitting a letter was repeated until only the “A” was left. Then the paper would be folded and worn around the neck. Judge for yourself whether this would have worked.
Milk transfusions
The Library of Congress’ website tells us that in the latter part of the 19th century “milk was believed to be the perfect substitute for blood.” An even-less-likely belief was that the fatty substances in milk would somehow transform into white blood cells after the fluid had been injected into a patient.
Remarkably, in some cases this therapy was a success. But in others it was an unmitigated disaster, with death a common outcome. After a catastrophic drop in pulse rate, one patient only survived the treatment by taking a lifesaving dose of whisky and morphine. Even so, the unfortunate victim died ten days later.
Rubbing ganglions away
According to the National Library of Medicine, Professor Lorenz Heister “was the major academic surgeon of the 18th century.” And a book he published on surgery became the standard text for doctors of the day. But one of his recommended treatments can only be described as bizarrely macabre.
The professor claimed that there was a particular way to treat ganglions, the hard cysts that sometimes appear on wrists or hands. He reckoned the way to get rid of ganglions, or Bible cysts as they’re sometimes known, was to rub it with a hand — but the hand had to belong to a dead man!
Saffron to improve mood
The Red Book of Hergest is a compendium of Welsh legends and history in prose and verse written between the late 14th and early 15th centuries. It includes a list of herbal treatments said to have been created by a doctor called Rhiwallon Feddyg.
One of the herbs mentioned by Dr. Feddyg is saffron, which comes from the flowers of the crocus plant. Today it’s used as an exotic ingredient in various recipes such as French bouillabaisse and Spanish paella. But Feddyg claimed that saffron could counter drunkenness and even produce happiness. Mixed with various ingredients — including raven bile and old white wine — the herb could reportedly also help with eye problems.
Dead-whale therapy
The origin of this extraordinary form of treatment was reported on by an 1896 edition of The Florida Agriculturalist. “A drunken man,” the tale went, “was staggering along the beach near the whaling station at Twofold Bay and seeing a dead whale cut open, took a header into the decomposing blubber.”
This unfortunate mishap on the coast of Australia led to the discovery that lying in the body of a dead whale was an effective treatment for rheumatoid arthritis. Or so it was claimed. Subsequently a hotel for arthritis sufferers was opened by the ocean. Whenever a dead whale was spotted, a hole would be cut in the carcass so that a patient could clamber into the cadaver. It’s a treatment that seems to have fallen out of favor in modern times.
Human corpses as medicine
In her 2011 book Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture Louise Noble describes an especially gruesome treatment. She writes that the second-century Greek physician Galen recommended “the curative effect on epilepsy and arthritis of an elixir of burned human bones.”
Galen wasn’t the only medic to use human cadavers for medical purposes. Paracelsus, a 16th-century Swiss doctor, was very keen on using body parts including “mummy, human blood, fat, marrow, dung, and cranium in the treatment of many ailments.” Mummy? Yes, that was material extracted from ancient Egyptian corpses. This could apparently be used as everything from a painkiller to an anti-inflammatory and a blood-thinner.
Snake oil for arthritis
Proverbially, snake oil is any kind of fake medicine prescribed by quack doctors. But at one time it actually was a treatment. Literal snake oil as a medicine is said to have arrived in the U.S. in the 19th century, brought by Chinese laborers working on railroad construction.
This lotion was derived from the Chinese water snake, also known as the rice paddy snake, and it was only weakly venomous. The unguent was used to treat arthritis and Chinese workers employed it as a soothing ointment to ease sore muscles after a hard day building railroads. It was an American charlatan called Clark Stanley who first gave snake oil a bad name by selling fake potions.
The iron lung
Before a highly successful program of vaccination got going in the U.S. and elsewhere, polio was a devastating disease. It could cause severe deformation of the legs, and in some cases patients were unable to breathe unaided. It could also be fatal: a 1952 outbreak in America resulted in 3,000 deaths. At the time polio killed around 500,000 people every year worldwide.
For those who had serious and life-threatening difficulty breathing there was only one treatment: the iron lung. Take a look at a picture of one of those and you’ll see it has the look of a medieval torture device. A patient would be effectively imprisoned in the iron lung, which used a vacuum effect to push air into the lungs. The best you could say was that it was preferable to death by asphyxiation.
Epilepsy treatments
To the ancients, epilepsy was a mysterious and feared condition, with sufferers often shunned by society. Strange treatments came into vogue over the centuries; the Romans believed it could be treated by drinking the blood of a gladiator. By the 17th century treatment with something called margrave powder had become popular.
This concoction included gold, ivory, and pearl as well as mistletoe, elk hoof, and unicorn horn. Where the unicorn horn came from is anybody’s guess! Another remedy was published in the 1710 Book of Phisik. It called for a powder made from deer bones and a man’s hair, to be taken just before the Moon was full.
The tapeworm diet
The tapeworm diet became popular in the early 20th century, the BBC tells us. Tapeworm eggs would be ingested in pill form, and the idea was that at least one of them would hatch out. The parasite would then proceed to eat some of the food its human host consumed, thus causing weight-loss. Unfortunately, the tapeworm was also likely to cause vomiting and diarrhea.
Once dieters had reached their preferred weight they’d take an anti-parasitic preparation to flush out the tapeworm. As the BBC points out a tapeworm can grow to 30 feet in length so getting rid of it could result in “abdominal and rectal complications.” Plus tapeworms can “cause many illnesses including headaches, eye problems, meningitis, epilepsy, and dementia.”
Old hangover cures
One of the oldest hangover cures is the one known as “hair of the dog.” That entails something no doctor would recommend: simply carrying on drinking. But there are plenty of other ancient hangover cures around, although we don’t vouch for any of them. The ancient Assyrians, for example, recommended a preparation containing myrrh and powdered bird beaks.
Later, in medieval Europe physicians swore by a potion of bitter almonds and raw eel. The Mongolians favored snacking on pickled sheep eyes, while the Chinese recommended green tea. Personally, we’d go with that gentler Chinese remedy. Alternatively you can of course avoid hangovers altogether by not drinking to excess.
Trepanation
Trepanation, also known as trephination, is the practice of drilling holes into the skulls of live patients. It’s a procedure that carries obvious risks: a slip of the drill could be entirely catastrophic. Even so, it’s been a popular remedy through the ages with archaeological evidence showing it was around as far back as the Stone Age.
We can’t guess why humans trepanned back in the Stone Age. But we do know that the ancient Greeks used it to treat a variety of head injuries, including skull fracture. And The MIT Press Reader website asserts, “From the Renaissance until the beginning of the 19th century, trephining was widely advocated and practiced for the treatment of head wounds.” Sadly, the procedure did have a high incidence of fatality.
The Revigator
A device called the Revigator came onto the market in the U.S. in about 1924. The Museum of Radiation and Radioactivity website notes that it was sold as “an original radium ore patented water crock.” It’s scarcely believable purpose was to add radioactive radium to a household’s drinking water. Scarily, the Revigator was a commercial success in its day, with hundreds of thousands of examples sold.
The company boasted that every day “the family is provided with 2 gallons of real, healthful radioactive water… nature’s way to health.” It’s worth noting that the Radiation and Radioactivity Museum includes its entry for the Revigator in a category titled “Radioactive Quack Cures.” It turns out there were a surprisingly large number of those.
Bald’s Leechbook
One of the volumes held in the British Library’s extensive collection is the only surviving copy of a work titled Bald’s Leechbook. It dates from the 11th century and contains many truly eccentric remedies. Some of the ingredients recommended for medical use include “spittle, snails, urine, worms, weevils, and ants,” a blog on the British Library website tells us.
One remedy that catches the eye is actually for swollen eyes. You were advised to catch a live crab, cut off its eyes and rub them on your neck. Headaches, on the other hand, could be treated with a mixture of honey and beetroot. Doctors smeared this on the patient then got them to lie in the Sun, while the liquid dripped down the face.
Lobotomy to ease mental suffering
In 1936 an eminent American doctor called Walter Jackson Freeman II learnt about a gruesome experiment on chimpanzees. A section of the primates’ frontal brain lobes had been cut away. Afterwards one chimp “experienced reduced agitation” as Britannica has it. Freeman decided this could be a viable treatment for humans suffering from mental illness.
Freeman called his new procedure lobotomy, and he carried out the first one on a 63-year-old woman with bipolar and depressive illness. But lobotomy was highly controversial, not least because of its fatality rate. As Britannica points out, “Of the 3,500 lobotomies [Freeman] performed or supervised during his career, an estimated 490 individuals died as a result of the treatment.” After the 1960s the procedure fell out of favor.
Stopping nosebleeds
Nosebleeds are a common-enough affliction, and doctors have searched for ways to stop them since ancient times. A paper by H. Feldmann archived in the National Library of Medicine describes some of the earliest treatments. In one, blood was to be diverted away from the nose “by applying tourniquets to legs and arms.”
Medieval medics favored staunching the flow of blood with a plug placed in the nostrils. The plug could be made of something called “cranial moss.” Feldmann describes that as “the lichen that grew on the skulls of hanged corpses exposed to the weather for a long time.” Alternatively a powder made from Egyptian mummies could be used. We’ll probably stick to tissues!
Smoke enemas
Everyone knows smoking is bad for your health. Now, those who pursue the evil habit usually smoke with their mouths, but how about blowing some cigarette smoke up your backside? Unlikely as it may sound, that actually was a recommended treatment for some conditions.
The Library of Congress gives an example that was published in The Charlotte Democrat in 1872. Apparently a man who had been imprisoned in the Fulton County jail was struck down by meningitis. It’s a serious illness, of course, and one that can lead to death. But the weird tobacco-smoke trick was used on the prisoner; he’s said to have made a complete recovery.
Malariotherapy
Of all the sexually transmitted diseases out there, syphilis is certainly one of the most horrible. Famous names said to have succumbed to the condition include Al Capone, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Oscar Wilde. A disparate bunch indeed, brought together by one horrible malady.
Malariotherapy as a treatment for syphilis was in vogue from the 1920s through to the 1940s and actually involved deliberately infecting patients with malaria. This treatment may sound wacky, but the man who developed it, Austrian psychiatrist Julius Wagner-Jauregg, won a Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work in 1927. Surprisingly, according to the Science History Institute’s website, “Overall, roughly 30 percent of neurosyphilitics recovered completely with malariotherapy.”
Bloodletting
Throughout history right up until relatively modern times, one of the most popular medical treatments was bloodletting. There were two basic ways of bleeding a patient. A physician could simply make a cut into a vein, usually on the arm, or bloodsucking leeches could be attached to the patient.
The practice of medical bloodletting probably comes from ancient Egypt; it seems the Greeks were quite keen on it too. The third-century Greek medic Erasistratus “believed that all illnesses stemmed from an overabundance of blood,” according to History.com. In the Europe of the Middle Ages, bleeding was prescribed for everything from gout to smallpox and epilepsy.
Deviant dentistry
Teeth-grinding, which dentists call bruxism, is a condition that can lead to severely impaired teeth and gums. But the ancient Egyptians had a cure for it, or so they believed. All you had to do was share your bed with a human skull for seven days.
Another decidedly peculiar dental treatment favored by Egyptians involved mice. To be precise, it required a paste made from dead mice: this was to be smeared on to the patient’s decaying tooth. As well as being highly unlikely to relieve toothache, it sounds very much like a surefire recipe for infection.
Pelvic massage
It seems that 19th-century doctors were rather keen on the use of vibrators for their female patients. They were to be employed not for salacious purposes, it was claimed, but to cure a largely fictional female disease known as hysteria. This hysteria could lead to a wide range of symptoms, including irritability, insomnia, anxiety, and faintness.
According to History.com the vibrator was used to give a “pelvic massage.” This would inevitably lead to what was called a “hysterical paroxysm”; that phrase was simply a euphemism for an orgasm. In some cases the doctor himself would administer the treatment. Today of course we’d have little hesitation in calling this “medical malpractice.”
Mercury to treat syphilis
Even if you have nothing more than a basic grounding in chemistry, you’ll know that mercury can be lethally poisonous. Yet for some 3,000 years it was a substance freely used by medics: quicksilver was administered to treat everything from constipation to syphilis. That latter disease can of course cause death, but it’s a moot point as to what was worse, the condition or the treatment.
All the same, the use of mercury as a treatment for syphilis continued right up until the early 20th century. In the 19th century it was prescribed for use in a vapor bath, as an ointment and even as a douche.
Xenotransplantation
If you’re looking for an especially stark example of medical madness, then the practice of xenotransplantation will comfortably fit the bill. A 1919 story in the New York newspaper The Sun reported the claims of one Dr. Serge Voronoff. He asserted that he’d found an effective way to restore lost youth and vitality.
The Sun reported that Voronoff claimed to have “restored youthful energy to a man of 80 years,” quite an achievement. He claimed he’d done that using what he called xenotransplantation. This involved taking a particular gland from a chimpanzee and grafting it into a man. But in a 1929 report in the Indianapolis Times, Voronoff admitted that “gland operations will not restore lost youth.”
Vin Mariani as a tonic
Angelo Mariani, a Corsican pharmacist, was the man who gave the world Vin Mariani, a tonic wine. It became highly popular in the 19th century and an impressive bevy of the great and good lined up to praise it. These included Thomas Edison, Pope Benedict XV, President McKinley, and H.G. Wells. So what did this beverage have that made folk so enthusiastic?
What Vin Mariani had was a secret ingredient on top of the base of Bordeaux wine, a syrup made from the leaves of the coca plant. Yes, when people drank this tonic wine they were actually getting a hit of cocaine-induced euphoria. But the DEA website tells us that after the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, Vin Mariani lost the coca syrup.
Arsenic for leukemia
Arsenic is of course a deadly poison, yet it has been used by physicians as a medicine for thousands of years. Both the ancient Greeks and the Romans used the toxic substance for medical purposes, but its use was not confined to ancient times. It was also often prescribed for a range of illnesses in the 19th century.
Arsenic was also prescribed until the 1930s to treat chronic myeloid leukemia. But it was no longer used for treatment of other illnesses, displaced by modern antibiotics. All the same, recent research has shown that a Chinese herbal preparation containing arsenic actually is effective on one particular condition: acute promyelocytic leukemia. In the 1970s the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved arsenic trioxide to treat this form of cancer.
Plombage to treat tuberculosis
On the face of it, plombage is a bizarre medical treatment, since it involves the deliberate collapsing of a patient’s lung. The procedure was prevalent in the 1930s and ’40s to combat tuberculosis. Why? Medics believed that a lung infected with tuberculosis would heal more quickly if it was collapsed.
Surgeons would make a space below the ribs. They would then fill it with materials such as paraffin wax, oil, rubber balloons, or even ping-pong balls. Unfortunately this procedure carried a risk to the patient of infection and hemorrhage. The treatment has rarely been used since the 1950s thanks to the introduction of antituberculosis drugs.
Hemiglossectomy for speech defects
Famously, and as portrayed in the 2010 movie The King’s Speech, British monarch George VI suffered as a fairly severe stutter. He was able to overcome this handicap through speech therapy. But he was lucky not to have been alive in the 1840s, since back then there was a much more radical cure for stutterers: hemiglossectomy.
One J. F. Dieffenbach, a Prussian surgeon, pioneered hemiglossectomy, which involved the cutting out of a portion of the tongue. Medical science at the time believed that it was a fault in the tongue which caused stammering. Therefore it made sense to alter the shape of the tongue to overcome the stuttering. Probably better to stick to speech therapy!
Boiled carrots to treat asthma
As well as founding Methodism in the 18th century, Wesley published his Primitive Physick: Or, an Easy and Natural Method of Curing Most Diseases. It includes a dietary remedy for asthma. According to him, you could alleviate the condition by sticking to a carrot-only diet for 14 straight days.
In his 1910 volume Mother's Remedies: Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers of the United States and Canada, Dr. Thomas Jefferson Ritter had his own ideas about treating asthma: he recommended the use of chloroform. If that didn’t work, he suggested that the patient should inhale the fumes from burning coffee. Another unlikely alternative was to smoke cigarettes laced with thornapple, a poisonous plant from the nightshade family.
Old cures for gout
Gout, a type of arthritis, is a troublesome and uncomfortable condition which results in painful swelling in the joints, often in the big toe. CNN describes one especially cruel treatment that was used in the Middle Ages. First, you needed a dead puppy. Then you had to stuff it with sage and snails before roasting it. “The rendered fat was then used to make an ointment,” CNN tells us.
Another treatment method also required a dead animal, in this case an owl. The owl was to be salted, baked, and pounded into a powder. This powder was mixed with boar grease and then applied to the affected body part.
Ancient cures for rabies
As mentioned above, when we use the term “hair of the dog” today, we’re generally talking about a dubious hangover cure: continuing to drink. But when Roman chronicler Pliny the Elder coined the phrase in the first century A.D., he actually meant it literally. According to him, the hair of the dog could be a cure for rabies.
Pliny advised taking some hair from the rabid dog that had bitten the patient and burning it. The resulting ashes were rubbed into the bite wound. Another of Pliny’s recommendations was to actually eat the head of the offending canine. It was not until 1885 that French chemist Louis Pasteur came up with an effective rabies vaccine.
Old cures for headaches
If you had a headache, the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates recommended a poultice soaked in a solution containing vinegar, rose perfume, and iris. If the headache was especially persistent, then the poultice should be soaked in the juice of squirting cucumber. A squirting cucumber, Britannica tells us, is a “trailing herbaceous plant in the gourd family.”
The 10th-century medical text Bald’s Leechbook has some other suggested recipes for potions to rub on an aching head. One calls for a mixture of egg white, vinegar, and the stalk of a red nettle. Another suggests making a brew of mustard, laurel leaves, and more vinegar.
Couching to treat cataracts
According to a 2016 article published by the Missouri Medical Journal, the oldest known treatment for cataracts was known as “couching.” This rather terrifying procedure involved using a needle to dislodge the cataract from the eye’s lens. On the plus side, this usually created an instant and marked improvement in vision.
Unfortunately, there was also a grave downside to couching. Since the cataract was not removed from the eye, only dislodged from the pupil, the chances of infection were very high. That was especially true in an age when medical hygiene was primitive at best. The result was that the patient was quite likely to become completely blind not long after the treatment.
Paraffin wax for cosmetic surgery
In our age, injections of collagen and Botox are used to fight the effects of aging on the face. But medics in the early 20th century didn’t have those substances to treat older patients who wanted a more youthful look. But what they did have was paraffin wax, which was used as a filler to smooth out wrinkles.
Paraffin wax was also used as an early method of breast augmentation. The initial results for both faces and breasts could be quite encouraging. But as the years passed, unsightly lumps known as paraffinomas often developed. Unfortunately, it was almost impossible to remove those.
Snail-syrup medicine
In the Middle Ages, if you had a sore throat you were advised to go into the garden to collect around a pound of common snails. You then placed the mollusks in a bag and added a half-pound of sugar. A gooey liquid or syrup would form and begin to drip from the bag. This fluid was to be collected.
Now you had a supply of snail syrup which could be used to treat a range of ailments. You could use the syrup as an ointment to rub on burns or cuts. Plus you could spoon down the syrup to combat sore throats, coughs, and ulcers. Women could even use the snail potion as a face cream!
Moldy bread to treat cuts
It’s always annoying when you go for a slice of bread, but the loaf turns out to be moldy, and it has to go in the trash. But the ancient Egyptians and Greeks had a medical use for moldy bread: covered in honey, the inedible food was used in the treatment of cuts.
This practice was still in use up to medieval times. In Poland a piece of moldy bread was wrapped in spiders’ web and used to treat infected cuts. Of course, medics back then knew nothing about bacterial infection, but the mold on the bread might have acted as an antibiotic.
Dwale as an anesthetic
In England from the 12th to 15th centuries there was of course nothing in the way of the modern anesthetics that we take for granted. But there was a concoction called “dwale,” which was used to help patients endure the rigors of surgery. A 1999 article by anesthetist Anthony J. Carter published in The British Medical Journal described the recipe for this dwale.
Ingredients included three spoonfuls each of lettuce, hemlock juice, opium, and vinegar. Another ingredient was bile extracted from a boar for male patients and the same from a sow for women. The resulting mixture was to be blended with wine. Patients drank this potion before an operation and the surgeon would afterwards revive them by rubbing salt and vinegar on their faces.
Fart cure for the Black Death
The Black Death was a devastating disease which killed somewhere between 30 and 60 percent of Europe’s population during one two-year outbreak that started in 1348. Medics of the day had little idea of how the disease actually infected people, believing that it was carried by foul air. In truth, it was actually most likely passed between humans by fleas and lice.
Despite their ignorance, doctors at least had to try something. Using the foul-air theory, and the belief that like could cure like, the doctors came up with a treatment. Patients were told to capture and store the product of flatulence in a jar. When the Black Death was around, they were to fend it off by inhaling the contents of the jar.
Old cures for heart palpitations
Heart disease is a major killer, and heart palpitations can be an indication that all is not well. The National Institute of Health’s website notes that in the 16th century, the medicinal herb valerian was used to treat palpitations. Wesley — the 18th-century founder of Methodism who also wrote about medical matters — offered his own remedy for palpitations.
One of Wesley’s suggestions, startling in its simplicity, simply required the patient to drink a pint of cold water. Alternatively he suggested that someone suffering from heart palpitations should use a poultice soaked in vinegar. Another cure he promoted was electrical treatment, which as we’ve seen he also recommended for headaches, deafness and gout, among other ailments.