Peculiar Approaches to Health and Medicine Throughout History

While the medical world we live in is currently thriving, this certainly hasn’t always been the case.

It’s true that the world is still full of bogus health myths and ‘miracle cures’, but it’s safe to say the world has come a long ways since the archaic approaches of the past.  

From unnecessary surgeries to outlandish drugs, take a peek into past approaches and unearth old world views on health, wellness, and medicine.

Oddball Medicines

On my quest to find the weirdest old-world medicines, I stumbled upon an engaging resource by Penn Foster’s Pharmacy Tech program. The graphic in this post highlights five bizarre things we used to use to treat illnesses:

Eating toads was once a treatment for muscle aches and pains. In the late 1800’s physicians would prescribe a medicine made by mixing four boiled toads, a pound of butter, and an extract made from the arnica plant.

We now know that arsenic is poison, but people living even up until the 1950’s weren’t so informed. Arsenic used to be a common medicine for everything from syphilis to malaria.

Bird droppings used to be a go-to for treating burns. Popular in the mid-1600’s, this ointment was made from goose or chicken dung, boar fat, and an array of plants.

Dead mouse ‘toothpaste’ was used by Egyptians in ancient times. Mice were mashed up and directly placed in the mouth where pain persisted.

John Wesley, who also founded Methodism, thought he knew how to cure breathing problems.  A diet which consisting entirely of boiled carrots was believed to cure asthma and other breathing woes. Wesley is famous for saying “live a fortnight on boiled carrots only, it seldom fails.”

Swordplay That Was Sympathetic?

In addition to the odd forms of medicine listed above, the concept of the ‘powder of sympathy’ was a strange idea from the mind of seventeenth century philosopher, Kenelm Digby.

What was in Digby’s magic sword salve? Well, the first step was to gather up earthworms, a pig brain, some rust, and small bits from a mummified corpse. These ingredients were dried out until they could be ground into a powder and applied to weapons.

Oddly enough, Digby believed that when his powder was added to a weapon, the inflicted wounds would ultimately heal, rather than outright killing the enemy, thanks to the process of ‘sympathetic magic.’

Careless About Concussions

The world of professional contact sports, especially American football, has all but scrambled players’ brains over history.

In earlier years of professional organized sports, common opinions related to concussions and can be summed up by the following:  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Concussions and brain injuries were virtually unknown up until the 19th century. Oftentimes people believed that injuries to the head and brain were not based on something physical. Headaches, concussions, and other issues were thought be caused by spirits or other-worldly entities.

Once the world did start to comprehend concussions (also around the time contact sports became mainstream) views on these types of injuries were surprisingly melancholy.

A concussion timeline from the NCAA points out that helmets weren’t even required for pro football players before 1939. And even at that point, safety specifications for helmets and rules for limiting concussions weren’t ironed out until as late as 1996.   

And honestly, while safety measures are growing to an extent, concussions in pro sports aren’t something that’s going away. We’ve just gotten better at covering up concussions and are now finally coming up with solutions in the form of new technology for player safety.

Stutter No More

Nowadays, when people have stutters or other speech impediments treatment involves therapy and breathing control. A couple hundred years ago: not so much!

Back then, doctors would oftentimes simply cut off half the stutter's tongue. This was done without anesthesia, these procedures didn’t ever really work, and patients would regularly bleed to death.

Contraceptives Gone Absolutely Wrong

‘Safe sex’ practices of yesteryears were so strange that they hardly resemble modern contraceptives such as birth control and condoms.

While I’ve chosen to spare the borderline disturbing details, here’s a list of things used in the past for contraceptive purposes:

• Mercury
• Lemon halves or papayas
• Sea sponges
• Crocodile or elephant dung
• Tree sap and honey
• Cotton and wool

Think about these old-world approaches to health and medicine the next time you complain about the first-world problems of today. Is waiting half an hour for your doctor’s visit really that bad? We should remind ourselves of just how well off we have things thanks to modern medical advances. We are lucky to be alive in a timeframe where medicine and tech are thriving; eating toads is now optional, rather than prescribed.