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Mouse paste, leech therapy, tobacco smoke enema... the history of medicine has recorded some utterly weird and truly bizarre remedies to all sorts of bodily ailments and physical conditions. Most were quirky quack cures, disgusting perhaps, and for the most part totally unnecessary. But a lot of medical treatments were dangerous and sinister, and quite barbaric in application. Fortunately, health care has moved on since those early days of trial and error. But it's still enough to make your skin creep thinking about what patients had to endure in the days before good practice and common sense.
Click through the following gallery and take a deep breath as you examine this list of ancient remedies and bizarre cures you won't believe existed.
Definitely not for the squeamish, the bizarre fad for tapeworm was a dietary hit in the Victorian era. Ladies seeking bodily perfection would swallow a tapeworm egg pill knowing the critters thrive in intestines and would eat whatever they ate, leading to weight loss. Incredibly, ingesting tapeworm pills for this reason still takes place today.
The ancient Egyptians believed excreted animal feces—poo from dogs, cats, gazelles, and donkeys, among other beasts—could treat wounds and keep bad spirits away.
Back in the day, the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, and other ancient cultures thought nothing of sipping on urine for various health, healing, and cosmetic purposes.
Corpse medicine is medical cannibalism. The Romans were enthusiastic exponents of this unsavory practice, and routinely ingested remedies containing human bones, blood, and fat as medicine for everything from headaches to epilepsy. The idea obviously caught on because corpse medicine became equally popular in the New World and throughout Europe, peaking in the 16th and 17th centuries. (Photo: Wikimedia/CC0 1.0)
Bloodletting was widespread in antiquity, from 460 to 370 BCE. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Arabs, Asians, and, later, medieval Europeans thought the withdrawal of blood from a patient could prevent or cure illness and disease. Migraines and fever were among conditions treated by draining blood out of a vein or artery.
Leech therapy went hand in hand with the bloodletting process. It was used as a treatment for nervous system abnormalities, skin diseases, dental problems, and infections. Leech therapy is still in use in modern medicine practices because the little bloodsuckers secrete peptides and proteins that work to prevent blood clots.
Ancient Persians, Greeks, and Chinese believed drinking or applying mercury to the skin could extend lifespan. This deadly elixir of life, conjured up by the alchemists of the day, was also used to treat other nasty afflictions, including syphilis.
An example of radioactive quackery, in other words something improperly promoting radioactivity as a therapy for illnesses, radium water was the energy drink of its day. Except radium is super toxic and harmful to life! But that didn't stop solutions like Radithor being manufactured. From 1918 to 1928, Radithor was advertised as "A Cure for the Living Dead" and "Perpetual Sunshine," and claimed to cure impotence, among other ills.
Trepaning is a surgical intervention in which a hole is drilled or scraped into the human skull. It was used as far back as 7,000 years ago by ancient cultures to treat health problems related to intracranial diseases or to release pressured blood buildup from an injury. Incredibly, this shocking practice was still finding favor into the 1900s.
Place a cup of maggots into the non-healing skin and soft tissue wounds of a human and they'll gobble up the gangrene with delight. Yep, fly larvae only eat dying tissue. Written records have documented that maggots have been used since antiquity as a wound treatment. The procedure came to prominence during the American Civil War, and has been used on occasion ever since.
Physicians in ancient Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) diagnosed illness not by inspecting the patient but by examining the livers of sacrificed sheep. At the time, the animal's liver was thought to be the source of human blood, and hence the source of life itself. Pictured is a clay model of a sheep's liver crafted around 2,050 BCE.
Apparently, toothache and earache could be cured in ancient Egypt with a dab of mouse paste. Dead rodents were routinely mashed into a pulp for treating ailments. The English adopted a similar practice in the 1500s when they started applying rotting rat tissue to unsightly warts.
The medical definition of hemiglossectomy is the surgical excision of one lateral half of the tongue. Back in the mid-1800s, it meant the partial removal of a patient's tongue—to cure stuttering! Furthermore, this cruel and barbaric procedure was often performed without anesthesia.
Mid-1800 quack cures included treating asthma with dried toad. Crushed into powder and made into small pills, the remedy was supposed to cure the dry and convulsive form of the condition.
Tooth in the eye is street slang for osteo-odonto-keratoprosthesis, a treatment for corneal blindness. Pioneered in the early 1960s, the patient's tooth is extracted, and a lens is placed within a drilled hole. It's then implanted into the patient's cheek to grow a new blood supply. Later, it's placed in the eye. And you know what? It works!
Produced as a cure-all for fussy babies in the mid-1800s, one drop of this serum was advertised as enough to pacify even the most troublesome of infants. And no wonder! The syrup contained codeine, opium, and heroin. A teaspoonful was enough to kill a child outright.
Heroin was first made in 1874 from morphine in an attempt to produce a substance less potent and less addictive. Unfortunately, the chemists got the formula wrong. Commonly prescribed in the late 19th century as a cure for coughs, back pain, and insomnia, this "non-addictive morphine substitute" quickly became one of the most destructive substances ever introduced into society.
Mental illness has baffled medics and scientists for millennia. But in the early 20th century, a procedure known as a lobotomy was heralded as a breakthrough in further understanding the vagaries of the human mind. During a lobotomy, the nerve pathways in the lobes of the brain are severed. Few patients experienced any symptomatic improvement after undergoing the operation. Eventually, lobotomy was recognized for what it really is–an invasive and barbaric procedure–and rightly disparaged and condemned. (Photo: Wikimedia/CC BY-SA 3.0)
Fraudulently claiming to be a physician, John R. Brinkley (1885–1942) became known as the "goat-gland doctor" after declaring he could cure impotence, infertility, and other sexual problems by surgically implanting goat testicles into a man's scrotum. He even advertised his "breakthrough," a boy called Billy, the first goat-gland baby, supposedly conceived by a patient with goat testicles.
Some 18th-century doctors believed that gout in the foot or hand could be cured by applying a raw lean beefsteak to the limb. It was recommended the steak be changed every 12 hours or so.
We all know smoking kills, right? But back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the damaging effects of nicotine weren't yet discovered or widely accepted, puffing on tobacco was believed to cure a number of ailments, including—don't laugh—asthma!
Methamphetamine was discovered in 1893 and soon became a substance of choice to treat a variety of ailments, including narcolepsy and asthma. But it later found favor as a treatment for weight loss. In the 1950s, Obetrol was marketed as a remedy for obesity. Highly addictive, methamphetamine can induce psychosis, breakdown of skeletal muscle, seizures, and bleeding in the brain.
We have one Sir Kenelm Digby (1603–1665) to thank for the "powder of sympathy," a form of sympathetic medicine that the Englishman hoped would cure a very specific injury: sword wounds. His wacky solution was to grind earthworms, pigs' brains, iron oxide (rust), and bits of mummified corpses into a powder. But here's the rub: the powder was applied not to the wound itself but to the offending weapon. Digby surmised that the strange concoction would somehow encourage the wound itself to heal—via a process he called "sympathetic magic."
In 1863, a wine said to restore health, strength, energy, and vitality was introduced. The potent tipple was widely endorsed by celebrities of the age, and even the Pope admitted to a glass or two. And why was it so popular? Cocaine, that's why. The drink contained 7.2 mg of cocaine per fluid ounce of wine.
Arsenic is one of history's oldest medicines, even though its toxic properties are well known. The chemical was being used right up to the 20th century to treat a number of diseases, including syphilis and some cancers.
Who would deliberately collapse a lung in order to treat tuberculosis? Well, that's exactly what they did before the introduction of effective tuberculosis medicine. The procedure is known as plomage, and was widely practiced by physicians from the 1930s to the 1950s. Side effects included hemorrhage and infection. (Photo: Wikimedia/CC BY-SA 3.0)
Some misguided physician in the 18th century came up with the notion that inducing a tobacco smoke enema could help those suffering from headaches, respiratory failure, colds, or abdominal cramps. It was believed that nicotine could stimulate a patient's adrenal glands, produce adrenaline, and revive them. The idea eventually went up in a puff of smoke.
Ancient Chinese medicine did indeed include genuine snake oil among its cures. But by the mid-19th century in the United States, snake oil had become a euphemism for deceptive marketing. Dishonest peddlers were selling snake oil liniment, in fact nothing more than mineral oil mixed with a few active and inactive herbs and with no healing properties whatsoever.
Among the more bizarre cures for treating nose bleeds was a 1740 remedy whereby the patient could either eat raisins every day or opt for snorting or drinking vinegar.
The cure-all method to alleviate a host of maladies was to vomit, so recommended the 18th-century English evangelist John Wesley. He suggested applying a large sliced onion to the pit of the stomach, in other words ingesting it, as a way of inducing a fit of vomiting.
Ancient remedies and bizarre cures you won't believe existed
Examine this list of weird medical treatments
HEALTH Medicine
Mouse paste, leech therapy, tobacco smoke enema... the history of medicine has recorded some utterly weird and truly bizarre remedies to all sorts of bodily ailments and physical conditions. Most were quirky quack cures, disgusting perhaps, and for the most part totally unnecessary. But a lot of medical treatments were dangerous and sinister, and quite barbaric in application. Fortunately, health care has moved on since those early days of trial and error. But it's still enough to make your skin creep thinking about what patients had to endure in the days before good practice and common sense.
Click through the following gallery and take a deep breath as you examine this list of ancient remedies and bizarre cures you won't believe existed.