Kenneth Glad
We trust medical professionals to heal us when things go wrong. Most of the time, their guidance relies on solid science and years of careful study. But if you look back through the centuries, professional health advice looked completely different.
For thousands of years, doctors believed a woman’s uterus could detach and wander around her body. Ancient Greek texts blamed this bizarre movement for causing spasms and severe anxiety.
To fix this imaginary problem, doctors prescribed warm baths and strong garlic.
Bloodletting held on even longer as a standard medical practice. According to HistorieNet, doctors drained blood using leeches to restore physical balance from ancient Egyptian times right up until the 1940s.
They kept bleeding patients even after studies showed it heavily increased pneumonia death rates.
Blowing heavy smoke
In the eighteenth century, a French scientist promoted a wild way to save drowning victims. René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur told rescuers to blow tobacco smoke into the patient’s rectum.
People genuinely believed the warm smoke revived the unconscious. Real resuscitation techniques finally replaced the dangerous practice a century later.
Prominent physician Sir William Osler also endorsed smoking to treat asthma.
He wrote in 1901 that inhaling regular tobacco smoke worked just as well as toxic medical cigarettes. Those early medical versions contained poisonous plants that caused severe hallucinations.
Dangerous daily habits
Medical history is absolutely packed with terrifying drug recommendations. Young Sigmund Freud praised cocaine as a brilliant stimulant in 1884, using it himself before understanding the severe addiction risks.
A few years later, the pharmaceutical industry pushed heroin as a perfectly safe cough medicine. HistorieNet notes that one company even marketed heroin drops for three-year-old children in 1911.
Meanwhile, famous American doctor John Harvey Kellogg developed bland cornflakes specifically to suppress sexual desires and prevent masturbation.
To avoid bad habits from developing in young boys, he also pushed for painful circumcisions without anesthesia.
Extreme disease treatments
Doctors often turned to extreme poisons before modern antibiotics existed. American surgeon Samuel D. Gross noted in 1874 that physicians treated syphilis with highly toxic mercury, causing massive tooth loss and nerve damage.
Other doctors tried experimental fluids to save lives. In 1878, doctor T. Gaillard Thomas tried injecting cow milk directly into human veins to replace missing blood.
His patients suffered terrible fevers and extreme breathing problems instead of getting better.
Later, Austrian psychiatrist Julius Wagner-Jauregg noticed something unusual about patients suffering from advanced syphilis. The disease often attacked the brain, leaving victims completely paralysed, severely demented, or mentally ill.
He realised that high fevers sometimes improved these terrifying symptoms. Acting on this observation in 1917, he deliberately infected nine syphilis patients with deadly malaria to trigger a massive spike in their body temperature.
HistorieNet writes that the extreme fever caused significant improvement in six of those patients, and three even returned to work. The radical experiment earned him a Nobel Prize a decade later, even though the deliberate malaria infection killed some patients shortly after the treatment.
Sources: HistorieNet
