12 Worst Doctor Cures Throughout History
From leeches on your privates to holes in your skull to release demons, we count twelve of the worst doctor cure2.bp.blogspot.coms throughout history!
12 – Bloodletting and Leeches: Bloodletting was a common
medical procedure prior to the Nineteenth Century. It involved flushing out bad ‘humors’, which
are black and yellow bile, blood and phlegm.
In the middle Ages you could get this done by your local barber-surgeon
right after a haircut and some light dentistry work. Several bloodletting
methods involved drawing blood from veins and arteries using barbaric tools,
but leeches were the most popular method.
The French were particularly mad for this; during the 1800s, they went
through forty million leeches a year.
They attached them to patients’ arms, legs, torso and other more
sensitive areas. Leeches were tied to a silk thread, lowered down a person’s
throat and reeled in like a fish. They
were also applied to women’s vaginas to relieve uterine disease, sexual excitement
and general ‘hysteria’. British gentry
had their wives leeched every two weeks. Sometimes leeches wound up lost inside
female patients, which certainly didn’t help with the old ‘hysteria’. However, doctors in these cases didn’t sweat
it because they were sure the leech would ‘find its way out eventually’.
11 – Mercury Poisoning: The silvery liquid Mercury was once
used to treat everything from scraped knees to constipation. Its side effects were indistinguishable from
the symptoms of syphilis, which it was commonly used to treat. We now know it’s
extremely toxic and that mercury poisoning comes with a laundry list of
symptoms. These can include chest pains,
heart and lung problems, tremors, muscle spasms and psychotic reactions like
delirium, hallucinations and suicidal tendencies. Find a new high, kids. Mercury can kill you!
10 – Trepanation: Trepanation is a treatment for mental illness
that began 7,000 years ago. It involved
making a hole in the skull using an auger, bore, or saw to relieve headaches,
mental illness, or even demonic possession. With no knowledge of brain chemistry,
ancient doctors believed the mentally ill had literal demons living inside
their heads, so holes were drilled into patients’ skulls to allow these spirits
to escape. The horrifying thing is that anesthetics
weren’t used in a lot of these cases. The practice still goes on today for a small
number of strange and misguided folks.
These days a single small hole is sometimes made in the skull to treat
brain hemorrhaging after severe head trauma.
9 – Impotence Shock Therapy: Impotence is one of the most embarrassing
problems a man can face … or so I hear.
Throughout history, men with uncooperative little guys have searched
desperately for something that can cure their bedroom woes. With the late
Nineteenth Century invention of electricity, men and their frustrated wives
hoped the new technology could take them straight to Boner Town. Doctors devised a range of devices and
products designed to get penises to stand to attention. These included electrified beds and
complicated ‘cock-shocking’ electric belts.
Just the thing to set the mood! Other strange treatments for erectile
dysfunction have included testicle implants, radium suppositories, ingesting
Spanish Flies, drinking frog juice and stimulating blood flow with wasp stings
and spider venom.
8 – Female Hysteria Treatments: According to Nineteenth
Century doctors, female moodiness is a symptom of a very serious medical condition
called female hysteria. Any woman who displayed symptoms like nervousness,
chattiness, unwillingness to talk, irritability, or disobedience towards their
supreme overlord Victorian husbands was ordered to have a doctor-administered vaginal
massage until their hysteria subsided.
You’re right – the Nineteenth Century’ s idea of treatment does sound
suspiciously like molestation! The list of symptoms for female hysteria was so
long that literally any ailment could fit its diagnosis. Doctors eventually invented the vibrator to
alleviate hand strain.
7 – Pain and Rotational Therapies: As the Treasurer of the
Mint, signer of the Declaration of Independence and author of various medical
textbooks, Benjamin Rush was America’s most beloved, trusted doctor. His
biggest contribution was in the area of psychiatry. Rush believed pain and suffering had curative
powers, so patients paid him actual money to beat, starve and verbally abuse
them – all in the name of medical science! His torturous practices also
included pouring acid on their backs, cutting them with knives and keeping
wounds open for months or even years to encourage ‘permanent discharge from the
brain’. Rush also believed mental illness was caused by poor circulation to the
brain, so devised something called rotational therapy, where patients were
twirled from ropes suspended from the ceiling for hours at a time. He was one sick creative bastard.
6 – Cocaine Cures: Cocaine is a symbol of Eighties excess,
but it may surprise you to learn that it was originally used medicinally. In
1884, Austrian ophthalmologist CarlKoller somehow discovered that placing
cocaine on a patient’s cornea temporarily desensitized the eye to pain, making
eye surgery less risky. When word of his discovery spread, doctors realized
that cocaine could be used as an aesthetic for all kinds of procedures. Scepticswere initially concerned about the
drug’s addictiveness, but doctors scoffed, claiming it was no more addictive
than tea or coffee. By 1900, Americans could walk into any pharmacy and
purchase a gram of pure cocaine for twenty-five cents. The drug was mixed into everything from wines
to soft drinks to cigars. Companies
offered hypodermic needle skits so patients could inject themselves from the
comfort of their own homes. Cocaine was additionally prescribed for hemorrhoids,
indigestion, appetite suppression, fatigue, shyness and toothaches. Even kids got in on the craze until, by 1902,
up wards of 200,000 Americans were addicted.
The addiction became an epidemic, and states and local governments were
forced to intervene. Good times.
5 – Urine Therapy: Forget rest, nutrition and exercise; an
alarming number of cultures and people throughout history believed wallowing in
urine was the key to good health. Urine therapy was said to cure an extensive
list of ailments and promote good health if drank, applied to the skin or used
to give a nice … bracing … urine enema.
I wonder if vomit has any good health properties. Because I can feel my
breakfast coming back up! The sad part is that even though all of these
purported benefits have been disproved urine therapy is still practiced
today. Even peeing on a jellyfish sting
has no scientific benefit, so keep it in the toilet or on tree trunks.
4 – Insulin-Coma Therapy: Insulin-coma therapy came about
entirely by accident when a Viennese doctor named Manfred Sakel accidentally
overdosed a patient oninsulin overdose in 1927.
The patient, who was a morphine addict, fell into a deep coma and awoke
to discover that her addiction – and probably eight percent of her brain
capacity– had disappeared. Sakel tried this again on another unsuspecting patient
and found similar results. He was soon
inducing insulin comas to schizophrenics and other patients. Some claimed to be cured of their
afflictions, but that was probably just the brain damage talking. The dangerous
therapy caused several casualties and was finally phased out in the 1960s. Sakel wouldn’t have been happy. I mean, if you want to make an omelet you’ve
got to break a few eggs. Right?
3 – Hot Iron Treatment for Hemorrhoids: In the Middle Ages,
it was not uncommon for disease sufferers to pray to patron saints for divine
intervention. During the Seventh Century,
an Irish monk named Saint Fiacre became the patron saint for hemorrhoid
sufferers. He developed hemorrhoids from digging in his garden but was one day
cured after accidentally sitting on a pointy stone. The stone is still around today and hemorrhoid
sufferers visit it hoping for a similar cure. News of the miracle travelled
until medieval physicians conceived the idea their white-hot cautery irons to
treat the problem. Pulling and
scratching them out with fingernails was another widely used solution.
Eventually a Twelfth Century Jewish physician named Moses Maimonides wrote
about his disapproval of the surgery and instead recommended the sits bath,
which is still the most common treatment for hemorrhoids today.
2 – Extreme Hot and Cold Therapies: For centuries, heat has
been used to cure mental diseases. In
fever therapy, fevers were induced by hot baths, electric heaters, and even
deliberate infection with malaria. Before penicillin, it was the most effective
way to treat syphilis, but patients had to be closely monitored as it came with
a pretty high risk of death. Extreme cold therapy was the inverse therapy and
was just as dangerous. Patient’s receiving this treatment were sometimes refrigerated
three days at a time at temperatures as low as 20° F below a normal, healthy
body temperature. Hydrotherapy was another risky treatment that bears little
resemblance to today’s relaxing equivalent.
Common in the early Twentieth Century, hydrotherapy patients usually
suffered mental disorders and wrapped like mummies in towels that’d been soaked
in icy water. Other times they were
strapped with restraints in a cold tub for days at a time or sprayed with
high-pressure water jets – sometimes while bound in a crucifix position.
1 – Lobotomy: Finally, we have everybody’s favorite mental
illness cure, the lobotomy. The lobotomy
was developed by Portuguese neurosurgeon Egas Moniz, who was inspired by tales
of a violent monkey that had become docile following the removal of its frontal
lobe. He theorized the frontal lobe was the source for mental illness, so cut
it out of his human patients. The
surgeries were a success – relatively speaking – and lobotomies became
widespread. Moniz even received the
Nobel Prize for his efforts in 1949. In the US, Dr. Walter Freeman made a
lucrative business out of driving around the country in his ‘lobotomobile’,
providing on-the-spot lobotomies to anyone who wanted them. Sometimes this was schizophrenics, other
times bored housewives. Dr. Freeman’s barbaric technique involved inserting an
ice pick into the eye socket and swirling it around to ‘disable’ the frontal
lobe. Because his surgical technique was
dangerously imprecise and his equipment was unsterile, Freeman was basically a
drive-by serial killer. Fortunately the lobotomy faded into medical obscurity
and modern-day brain surgery is a lot safer.
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