Morbid Medicine: History’s Deadliest Cures
From drilling holes in your skull to eating tapeworms for weight loss, we're looking at some of the most morbid medical advice that's been given throughout history
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SOURCES
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/the-plague
https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1540/medieval-cures-for-the-black-death/
https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/medieval-medicine-cure-black-death-what-caused-plague-epidemic-leprosy-sweating-sickness/
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/black-death-immunity-gene-crohns-disease-health
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/hole-in-the-head-trepanation/
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/as-the-worm-squirms/
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-horrifying-legacy-of-the-victorian-tapeworm-diet
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20695743
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3482033/
https://rxisk.org/a-blast-from-the-past-amphetamines-for-weight-loss/
https://plants.ces.ncsu.edu/plants/betonica-officinalis/
https://www.startribune.com/sept-18-1920-a-cranial-cure-for-criminal-tendencies/170286756/?refresh=true
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-15629160
https://share.america.gov/native-americans-many-contributions-medicine/
https://www.oneblood.org/media/blog/how-much-blood-is-taken-when-you-donate.stml
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3601883/
https://books.google.com/books?id=YEoEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA23&lpg=PA23&dq=%252522end+of+the+rainbow+may+be+tragic%252522&source=bl&ots=w_4JwGNw2u&sig=i1iWN15nqopmvu32O8Z9thTOsNo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjdgf221oXXAhWM-lQKHSVqC88Q6AEIKDAA%2523v=onepage&q=%252522end%252520of%252520the%252520rainbow%252520may%252520be%252520tragic%252522&f=false#v=onepage&q&f=false
TRANSCRIPT
Listener discretion is advised.
In the early morning of December 13th, 1799, George Washington woke in a panic, waking his wife as well. The night before, the first president of the united states, now two years retired, had been complaining of a sore throat. But in this moment, woken in a cold sweat, his throat was so swollen he was having trouble breathing.
His wife, Martha, sprung into action, and she sent someone at the Mount Vernon estate where they lived to go fetch the local doctor. But George’s throat was closing up, fast, and Martha knew she would need more than just a general doctor. So before the aide left to fetch help, she asked him to fetch them someone else as well. Someone who practiced one of the more common healing techniques at the time, but also the person who would ultimately lead to her husband's death. A bloodletter.
Bloodletting was the practice of, well, exactly what it sounds like, removing blood from a person in order to balance out their body chemistry.
Over the next few hours, Washington would be drained of 40% of his blood supply. That’s like if he gave blood back to back four times in a row. By that evening, he was dead.
Today, we have tools that could have saved the president. We would have known if what he was experiencing was bacterial or viral, we would have been able to intubate him and give him fluids to buy time while finding the right cure. Ultimately, he may have lived a few more good years.
But medicine has had to come a lonnnnng way to get to where we are today. So I want to take you on a little tour through the history of some of the strange and bizarre medical advice people have gotten over time. From drilling holes in your head to bloodletting based on astrology, we’re going to see what history has gotten wrong, and sometimes right, about medicine. Let’s dive in.
Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries. I’m your host, Kaelyn Moore
If you’ve made it this far, I’m assuming you are also a person with a dark curiosity. So welcome, you’re among like minded people here. If you’d like to dive deeper into the community, you can follow heart starts pounding on tik tok and instagram, or you can join our patreon, the rogue detecting society, where you’ll have access to some archived episodes and bonus content. I’m already planning the “not safe for work” version of strange and weird medicine for patreon, and you’re not going to want to miss that.
Throughout history, there have been times that we’ve come shockingly close to getting medicine right, without the modern knowledge we have. Native Americans would chew on willow bark for headaches and pains. The active ingredient there, salicin, lead to the creation of Aspirin. It was also the precursor to salicylic acid, commonly used in modern acne and dandruff treatments.
Ancient Egyptians used honey, a known antimicrobial, for wound care thousand of years ago, something we still occasionally do today. And then there was the clay tablet found from 2200 BC that had three healing gestures to follow when addressing a wound. It advised people to Clean the wound, create a dressing for the wound out of clay or plants, and then bandage the wound. Four thousand years ago, that’s not too shabby.
But the same field of healing that brought us wound care and pain management, also brought us lobotomies. Bloodletting, and many other forms of healing that today would make doctors and nurses clutch their stethoscopes like a Victorian woman learning about polyamory.
One of the worst in history, was a procedure called Trepanning
In 1865, Ephraim Squier was an archaeologist and explorer living in Cuzco, Peru, an old Incan city.
He was filling in for the US ambassador to central america when he received a gift from Senora Zentino, an art and antiques collector in Peru.
A skull, excavated from an Inca burial ground was cleaned and packaged for Squier. But there was something peculiar about it. On the top right half of the cranium was a half inch hole dug into the bone.
Squier couldn't believe it. This was evidence of a medical technique called trepanning, or drilling a hole into ones head for healing purposes. A technique that was being used in hospitals in America at the time with a 10% success rate. Yet here was a skull that was hundred of years old and from a civilization that didn’t have access to modern medicine. And it showed signs of the same procedure. And not only that, the scar formation near the holes edge indicated that the person who received this surgery had survived it and lived for at least a few more years after
What Squier and the medical world were about to realize, was that Trepanning was a thousands of years old practice used for treating head injuries by releasing what people thought were spirits in the head.
There were five main ways that ancient surgeons would open up peoples skulls. The first was a square cut, where four sides would be chipped into the skull until a square piece fell out. This mode has been observed in skulls found in Peru, France, Israel and Africa.
The second method was to scrape at the scalp with a piece of flint until you reached bone, and then keep scraping until a hole emerged. This method was also pretty common and was used until the renaissance in Italy.
A third was to cut a circular piece and lift it out of the skull. Which lead to the evolution of the fourth method, which was to use a trephine, a hollow cylinder with a jagged edge, to cut and remove the piece of the skull.
The fifth was the method most common in the middle ages. Which was drilling a few holes close to each other in the skull and chipping away at the bone between them until you had a hole.
I know what you may be thinking and I agree, this does sound painful. BUT as someone who suffers from migraines, I have fantasized about drilling a hole in my head to relieve some of the pressure.
And according to some accounts, it wasn’t as painful as you may think. Your scalp has nerve endings, but that skin is really thin. Once you get through it and hit the bone, you stop being able to feel anything. Which is incredibly different from digging into say, your gut, where you have thick skin and muscle to get through. So yes, it was painful, but for someone suffering from intense head pressure, the relief may have outweighed the momentary pain
You also might be wondering, wait, were they just leaving people’s brain exposed to the elements? From some first hand sources we have, the answer is no. Below your skull, before you hit your brain matter, there’s a strong, protective membrane called the dura.
The first detailed written accounts we have of trepanning come from the Hippocratic Corpus, which is the oldest manual we have for western medicine. You know Hippocrates, of Hippocratic oath fame? This book is based on his teachings and chapters in it date back to as early as 5th century BC. That means people were using trepanning 2500 years ago. And spoiler, Hippocrates loved to drill holes in peoples heads, but he wanted people to be sure to not pass or put pressure on the protective Dura. The procedure was not intended to expose someone's brain, as that was a sure fire way to die.
Hippocrates loved trepanning so much, he suggested it for nearly every head injury, and it remained a fan favorite form of relief from head injuries for centuries to come. There are texts suggesting it was used in China as early as the year 168. And we also have accounts of Cornish miners specifically asked for their heads to be trepanned after injuries, in the 1800’s
And there is some validity to this. Even today, small holes can be made in the skull to reduce intracerebral pressure.
The survival rate for this procedure varied, but we know survival was higher amongst the Incas than amongst 19th century americans. Hospitals were so dirty, and medical tools were so overused and unsanitized that any surgical procedure meant certain death. But Incas and ancient civilizations did some of these procedures outside in the open air, and didn’t use their tools on as many people. Survival rate was nearly 60% amongst them, compared to 10% in america.
But Trepanning may have opened the horrifying door to lobotomies sometime in the early 1900’s. While they were, at first, used as a tool to help with head injuries, doctors started noticing that they may alter people’s personalities, a dangerous realization that would open up the medical field to poking and prodding the brain to heal mental disorders via lobotomy.
In 1920, 15 years before the lobotomy debuted, there was an article in the Minneapolis Tribune about a young man, 19-year old Francis Poole, who underwent trepanning specifically for personality adjustment.
The story goes that three years prior, when Francis was only 16, he was accidentally shot in the head while in the state militia. It seemed that his wound was located on the top of his skull, as that was the area that was splintered and broken.
Surgeons got to work and were able to save Francis’s life and his head, and Francis was deemed healthy enough to fight in World War 1.
According to the article, there was no indication that anything was wrong with Francis until he returned home from war. His personality was different and he appeared to have a new found criminal tendency when he attempted to rob a cab driver.
Doctors that inspected Francis decided that the cause of his personality change was the pressure that had built up in his skull from the shooting. Not the fact that he, you know, just fought in a war, or that he was only 20 so maybe he was just….like that. it was decided that a hole would be drilled into Francis’s skull to relieve the pressure specifically to course correct his behavior
No follow up was ever done on Francis’s condition. We know he survived the surgery but we don’t know if this changed his quote unquote criminal tendencies. What we do know, is this was a time where more creative liberties were being taken in this field. The 20’s would see children who were recommended by the juvenile court system being operated on to relieve this cranial pressure and improve their behavior.
And all of this set the stage for 1935, when Egas Noriz, a portuguese neurologist started taking the procedure a step further and pushing past the dura into the brain. And thus the lobotomy was born. But that’s for another episode.
For now, here’s some wisdom from Medieval Doctors
Are you a medieval knight crusading for the lord? Have you experienced atrocities of war so depraved that you can no longer sleep? Do you sometimes leap naked from your bed to grab a sword like Henry the First would when he came back from battle? Try Bishopswart! Bishops wart is a beautiful purple flower, that when dried and ground into a powder, was a common treatment for knights having war time nightmares. It’s believed that it would quote, shield against monstrous nocturnal visitors and against fightful visions and dreams.
Think that your nightmares may actually be a form of PTSD that requires the oversight of a licensed counselor? Well this is the dark ages. We don’t have that…so. Bishops wart. It’s not effective, but it’s something!
More after the break.
For almost all of recorded history, humans have had complicated relationships with what we eat. The word diet has roots in ancient greece, and early texts show that there was once a meat-only craze amongst greek athletes, who thought abstaining from carbs was the best way to prepare for a race, the opposite of what is believed today.
A lot of this complicated relationship comes from the pursuit of the perfect figure, an ever changing goal post that often doesn’t align with our bodies natural shapes. We’ve sweat, stretched, swallowed, and starved our way towards perfection throughout history in some pretty peculiar ways. These are some shocking weight loss techniques that people have tried in the past.
One of the most bizarre, was the Victorian era tapeworm diet
It was believed, in the late 1800s, that by swallowing the eggs of a tapeworm, it would allow the parasite to grow inside your gut and that parasite would in turn eat your food for you. Advertisements at the time promised you could Eat! Eat! Eat! And always stay thin. Then, when you had reached your dream weight, you could take anti parasitic medicine to release the worm from your bowels.
Rumor had it that some doctors would hold food to one of the exits of your body to lure the tapeworm out.
The only problem with this method of weight loss was that tapeworm eggs were impossible to mail without killing the parasite, leading many to believe that these were just placebo pills being shipped to naive and desperate buyers. While we don’t know if the pills actually worked for anyone, we can believe that this was in reality probably a scam.
However, one very real pill that was being prescribed just a short time later was definitely doing what it was advertising, and much more.
At the turn of the 20th century, the ideal form for women was shrinking, and the general population desperately tried to keep up. they realized though, that to get their bodies to do what they wanted, they were going to need a little help.
Enter rainbow pills, a mixture of medicine for all of your woes. By the 30’s, doctors already knew that adding dessicated thyroid, the thyroid glands of other animals, to people’s diets made them lose weight. But this came with side effects like heart palpitations and weakness, so other medication was added to the cocktail to lighten the effects on the heart. That medication was Strychnine. Used in Rat Poison.
But the thirties brought a new miracle drug that was going to change the game of weightloss. Amphetamine. Also known as the suffix in Methamphetamine.
Amphetamines were first prescribed in inhalers in the early 30’s, but doctors noticed patients had amazing results. They loved the inhalers, like loved them so much they would get new ones just to crack them open and eat medication inside. And, on top of that, they were losing a ton of weight. The inhalers were giving them so many good ideas they didn’t have time to eat. That’s a joke about meth.
So of course, doctors added amphetamines to the already standard weight loss regiment. now, patients were prescribed amphetamines for appetite suppression, thyroid for thyroid function, and phenobarbital (a barbituate), aloin, and atropine sulfate to combat the intense upper effects of the drugs. Also they threw in laxatives for good measure. And each pill was a different color, hence the rainbow pill nickname.
This wolf of wall street style cocktail was affecting women, the main consumers, in various ways. Rainbow Pills were nicknamed mother’s little helpers for their energizing effects on housewives. But what started as an overly eager wife, quickly dissolved into a tweaking, paranoid woman. One woman recalled not being able to think about anything but the diet pills, eagerly waiting for her next dose each day. Women who were chatty and social retreated from view, wanting to be alone. The smallest inconvenience would send them into a violent rage.
Some women were having severe mental disturbances, experiencing “amphetamine psychosis” when they tried to come off the meds. Women would have trouble remembering their own names or what year it was. One woman described the visual hallucinations as the floor and walls closing in toward her. Another described seeing a demon in her toilet.
And while all of this was happening, two billion diet pills were being prescribed a year. They would be prescribed to anyone who asked for them. Susanna McBee, a reporter for Time Magazine, was 5’5 and 125 pounds when she visited 5 of these doctors. She left their offices with a prescription for, in total, 1,479 diet pills
But By the early 40’s, there were already deaths being reported by using the regimen. 19 year old Cheryl Oliver died in her college dorm from the stress the medicine was putting on her heart. In the 50’s the FDA started investigating, but rainbow pills werent banned completely until 1968.
Weight loss continues to be an area wrought with fads and scams, something that continues to be pervasive even to this day. It’s easy to prey on people’s insecurities and offer a miracle, cure. And all of them brag about having little to no side effects. It get’s depressing to think about, but we don't have time to dwell on that because it’s time for more medieval medical tips!
Are you melancholic because your whole town was pillaged during the crusades? Try opium poppy! Opium poppy is a heavy narcotic that will knock you out and get you highly addicted. You’ll be too focused on getting more opium poppy to even remember those soldiers burned down your village! We’ve also all talked, and we think the melancholy you’re experiencing is most likely due to demons in your brain, so it’s either this or trepanning. Honestly it’s up to you. Opium Poppy. It’s better than a hole in your skull.
Finally, It’s hard to imagine anything as stupifying and devastating as the Black Plague. It reached London in November of 1348, and by New Years, it was putting 200 people a day in their grave. By the end of it, it was estimated that between 40 and 60 percent of London died as a result.
Symptoms would start as a general malaise, but then your lymph nodes would turn black and swollen, usually in the armpit or groin. you blood would eventually become poisoned, and people typically died in a matter of days, sometimes hours.
But some doctors pounced on the prospect of being the first to cure the illness, and all sorts of wild treatments were tried.
Doctors at the time believed that the movement of the planets and constellations affected the movement of blood within your body. Certain astrological signs were attributed to parts of the body. Pisces was feet, aries was head, etc. when the moon moved into one of these constellations, that meant the blood in your body was pooling there.
Doctors, therefore, would try to remove blood from patients wherever the heavenly bodies were causing it to pool in order to restore balance to the suffering person. For the upper class, this meant attaching leeches to various parts of their body. For the lower class, this was by making small incisions to drain the blood. To no one's surprise. This didn’t work
No one had any idea what was causing the plague. people tried to stay away from the sick, but many things were blamed. Sin, a lack of sunshine, dirty air, humidity, the decomposition of the dead bodies, the stars and planets, God's wrath because people were eating too much fruit, God being made for numerous other reasons.
At the time, the most popular “cure” was called the Vicary method. To do this, you would take a chicken, pluck it’s back and rear completely clean, and then you would strap the exposed part of the chicken to the sick persons swollen lymph node. It was believed that eventually the chicken would start showing signs of illness, which meant that it was drawing out the illness from inside of the person. You would keep the chicken tied there until either the chicken or usually the person would die.
Other animals were believed to offer cures as well. Snakes were caught, chopped into pieces, and then rubbed all over the swollen, black lymph nodes. Snakes were associated with Satan, so it was believed that the evil snake would lure out the evil sickness. Pigeons were also used in this way, but they didn’t have the same evil connotations so it was unclear why they were chosen.
One animal that was highly sought after in medicine at the time because of it’s all-healing power was the Unicorn. Unicorns were rarely seen and even more rarely caught. But some doctors at the time SWORE they had retrieved unicorn horns for medicinal purposes. It was believed that only a young virgin maiden could lure a unicorn and lull it into submission. This treatment was incredibly expensive and therefore was only used by the wealthy. There is, of course, no evidence this helped anymore than tying a chicken to your groin.
One method that is still around today, was the invention of Four Thieves Vinegar. You may have seen four thieves in a lineup of essential oils. And while today it’s used mostly for cleaning and as an antibacterial agent, at the time it was given the name because it was believed four thieves were able to rob London because drinking this potion made them immune to the plague.
Four Thieves was a mixture of cider vinegar or wine, sage, cloves, rosemary and wormwood. Fine for consumption, but it wasn’t an effective plague cure.
Another potion was called Theriac, a mixture of 80 different ingredients and a ton of opium. This was also mostly used among the wealthy. It didn’t help, but it did get people’s mind off the fact that everyone they knew had just died.
While none of the expensive cures were actually working, it may have been believed they were working because wealthy people did fair a lot better than the impoverished at this time. Wealthy people had homes outside of the city they could retreat to, which at first wasn’t considered a reason as to why they were outliving others. And as a result, it was believed that marginalized communities were to be blamed for the plague’s spread. To combat this, they were either run out of town or killed to stop the spread. This, as always, did not help.
Though people tried a myriad of other horrible cures, i’m talking bathing in the urine of the unaffected, smearing feces on themselves, inhaling smoke from fires and trying to sweat out all of the liquid in their bodies. None of this helped to combat the plague, which would return every few generations to decimate the population of Europe until the invention of antibiotics. Oh, and it was fleas carrying Yersinia pestis from Rats that spread the plague, not god’s wrath.
One crazy fact though, is that not everyone who got the plague died. And it’s been discovered that those who survived the plague tended to live longer than the average life expectancy at the time, potentially passing longevity to the next generation.
Also, last year it was suggested that a genetic variant that causes Chron’s disease may have been the same gene that helped people survive the plague. So at the end of the plague, standing upon heaps of the dead, victorious after years of illness ravaging their city, were the girlies with the bad stomachs. I love that for them.
The plague is mostly gone, the use of antibiotics has largely eradicated it. but I couldn’t end this episode without mentioning that in 2016, I got infected with a strand of the plague. I kid you not, it felt like I had food poisoning for an entire year, and no one knew what it was until one doctor randomly tested me for it. It wasnt the actual plague, rather a variant of it I’m fine, but in my quest to feel better, I also tried whatever I could. I gave up every food you could imagine, I did acupuncture, tried chinese herbs, I almost drank castor oil once because a woman told me it would help. Maybe that's why I feel a bit of kinship to this episode. I know how it feels to be desperate for relief.
Though medicine today can be bizarre, uncomfortable, and at times embarrassing, it’s important to think of how far we’ve come. No one is going to burn you at the stake for requesting pain medicine during childbirth (a real thing that happened to Eufame Maclayne in the 1500’s) But we still have a long way to go, and I can’t help but wonder which models of medicine we use today that are going to be looked back on as archaic. Is the opioid crisis going to be considered an embarrassing blip of the 21st century? Are braces going to be a confusing relic? Hopefully, when I explain to my grandaughter what a pap smear is, she looks at me in horror, unable to conceive of such cruelty being done in her time. But we don’t have time to think about that now because it’s time for some more medical advice from a medieval doctor!
Were you trying to rid yourself of the plague by sitting next to a fire and inhaling the smoke when you accidentally burned yourself? Try snail mucus for burns! This one actually works, scientists today have found that the mucus from snails has healing properties and is rich in collagen. Hey, so maybe not all medieval medicine was bad after all.
This has been heart starts pounding. Written and produced by me, Kaelyn Moore. Sound design and mix by Peachtree Sound. Shout out to to our new patrons! Rachael, Zoe Elizabeth Alondra Sam Sandra Carrie Keelin Lynne Finley EM
Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Greyson Jernigan, the team at WME and Ben Jaffe. Have a heart pounding story or a case request? Check out heartstartspounding.com. Until next time, stay curious. ooooooo!