Ancient medicines you’d be better off without

Our ancestors didn’t really understand medicine very well, probably because they had no idea what germs were. This lack of understanding has led to a number of strange and just plain disgusting treatments being invented over the years, most of which would do much more harm than good. In the event you ever find yourself magically taken back in time a few hundred years and become injured, make sure you stay away from anyone calling themself a “healer” in case they give you any of these ancient medicines you’d be better of without.

Ancient Egyptian treatment for open wounds

Even though people didn’t understand bacteria in Ancient Egypt they did know that leaving an open wound would cause it to fester and become infected, so the answer to this was to combine human milk with ram hair, mix it together, and push it into the wound. Any bandaging effect the wool would have provided would be quickly spoiled by the human milk that would have been sitting in a jug in the desert sun all day, so next time you have a cut don’t rub people cheese and sheep hair into it because I promise you, it won’t help.

Stone Age cure for headaches – Trepanation

Everyone gets headaches at some point and those unlucky enough can also be afflicted with migraines. The feeling of pressure in your head can be very uncomfortable and is presumably the reason that people during the Stone Age decided to come up with a treatment to do something about it. A small hole would be drilled through the skull with a piece of flint until it made a hole that pierced the bone but didn’t go into the brain. You can only assume they thought the pressure inside the skull could be relieved if it had an outlet, but this method wasn’t a one off and numerous skulls from the Stone Age have been found with small holes drilled through them.

Ancient Roman cure for sickness – Blood letting

The practice known as blood-letting has been used by many cultures and nations across the globe but the earliest records of this strange remedy come from ancient Rome. When someone was ill it was believed the reason was that their blood was poisoned with “sickness” and needed to be removed. To do this they would make a series of small cuts on someone’s arm or leg and simply drain the blood out. They believed the bad blood would seep out and be replaced with new blood the body makes, eventually draining out all the sickness. This only meant that the body would have to work harder to create more blood at the same time as dealing with whatever illness it was. The practice continued all the way up until the 19th century and was especially popular with the gentry of Europe.

How to make yourself immune to the Bubonic Plague

During the mid 1300s a plague known as the Black Death devastated Europe and wiped out around half its population. During this age, no one understood how to make effective medicine, but they did know that having an illness once meant you were much less likely to catch it a second time, or at least as badly as before. In an attempt to make themselves immune to the plague, they would take scabs off an infected person’s wound and grind it into a powder before snorting it. The other method would be to make a small cut on your arm and rub infected puss into it, but whichever method you choose there’s no chance it will work since modern immunity shots are very heavily processed and involve more than rubbing infected puss into your arm which would only give you the illness you might have otherwise avoided.

Ancient Greek remedy to increase your life span

Mercury is one of the most dangerous metals you can come into contact with. Not only is it highly toxic but the fumes are very poisonous and can cause many effects from brain damage in unborn children to heart and lung problems. If you’ve ever heard the saying “mad as a hatter” it comes from when hat makers used mercury in the creation of hats and the fumes from the substance caused them to go insane. A long time ago starting in Ancient Greece amongst other places, mercury was considered to be a miracle cure and was heavily used as an ointment and even made into drinks. The tomb built for the emperor that contains the terracotta army was a man named Emperor Qin Shi Huang who regularly drank mercury and ultimately was killed by one of its organ-destroying effects. It wasn’t until the 20th century that people found out just how dangerous it is, and it was even used as a treatment for syphilis in Britain at one point.

Another Ancient Egyptian cure for……..anything

It’s just common sense that something your body expels probably isn’t good for you to re-ingest, if you go to the toilet then whatever comes out is waste and nothing more, but not to the Egyptians. Animal dung has been considered to have curing properties by many civilizations but the earliest mention comes from an Egyptian medical parchment called the Ebers Papyrus written in 1550 BC. It explains how certain dung such as dog and gazelle can cure various ailments and also has the ability to ward off bad spirits. Administering the dung to people would probably be done in the form of rubs or drinks, but either way, it would only make matters worse.

Middle eastern cure for being overweight

I’m sorry for showing you that picture but you should know just how disgusting this creature looks. A tapeworm is a type of parasitic worm that enters someone’s body in the form of a small egg which then attaches itself to the intestines and hatches. The worm then clings onto the intestinal pipe and eats all the digested food after it leaves your stomach, sapping it of all the nutrients. A person who has a tapeworm will lose a huge amount of weight as all the things they eat get processed by a worm that removes most of the nutrients, and knowing this people thought it was a good idea to give themselves tapeworm instead of doing exercise. This practice seems to have originated within the Middle East or possibly India, but it was practiced across a number of European countries as late as the 20th century.