9 Medical Procedures From the Past

Medicine in the past was horrifying. Some definitely more than others for sure. You probably know about leeching/bloodletting (you know, when doctors take leeches or a knife of some sort to get rid of the bad blood) and lobotomies. But what about other practices?

1. Waterboarding. Yep, you’re reading that right. Long before it was a torture method, it was a form of shock therapy for the mentally ill in 1800s and early 1900s. In one version of waterboarding, the medical staff would hold a patient's head underwater until they lost consciousness. Afterwards, they were considered cured, but that’s also assuming they didn’t die in the meantime. Other kinds included showering or dunking reclining patients without any warning. It’s not clear as to why or how this method was supposed to work.
2. Malaria. It made sense to them back then: syphilis needed heat to be cured. The only way to induce enough heat in the body to get rid of it was to give the patient malaria. On purpose. And it seemed to work too. An Austrian doctor named Julius Wagner-Jauregg came up with this idea. He started injecting people with malaria in 1917 and won a Nobel Prize for it in 1927. Only 15% of the doctor’s patients ended up dying.
3. Milk transfusions. Back in the 1900s, milk was seen as a good substitute for blood. The logic behind it? Thanks to the fatty and oily qualities to the liquid, it could easily turn into white blood cells. Only a few of the procedures were effective while the many others resulted in death. In one case, the milk transfusion immediately dropped the patient’s pulse and they had to be resuscitated with a combo of morphine and whiskey. They ended up passing away ten days after the operation.
4. Cigarettes and Chloroform. I put these two together because they both were considered cures for asthma. For cigarettes, it was already known that it would typically have the opposite effect but perhaps they thought that the two would cancel out? Chloroform was believed to relieve all symptoms, but many patients would tend to overdose on the drug while having an asthma attack.
5. Whales. An article from 1899 reported of a hotel in Australia that could help patients with rheumatoid arthritis. Patients would go to the hotel and wait for a whale to die closeby. They would then be rowed out to the carcass, where the animal would then be cut open. The person would lay in the body for two hours. It was supposed to help with soreness and inflammation.
6. Smoke enemas. Tobacco smoke enemas were supposed successful treatments for cholera. These treatments were the recommended alternatives for opium. There were various ways to administer the enemas, but one common way was to boil water with tobacco and administer them to the intestines.
7. Arsenic. Strange, but it was also strangely effective. We know today that arsenic is highly toxic and of course leads to arsenic poisoning. People didn’t drink it all by itself, but it was still a key component in many medicines. It was used to treat malaria and syphilis from the late 18th century all the way up to the 1950s!
8. Trepanning. This procedure was used in ancient times and was the act of drilling or cutting a hole in the skull. It was used to help with headaches, seizures, and mental disorders. As you can possibly imagine, it was done without the use of any type of anesthesia or sterilization. With that also came high risks of infection and death.
9. Python bile. This method was believed to cure a number of ailments in ancient China. Specifically it was used to treat external ulcers on external female genitalia.