Horrible Ancient Medicines and why you shouldn’t try them
It has only been within the closer half of the last 100 years that we as a race have started to understand medicine. Before this, it was mostly down to luck and guesswork to cure an illness, with everything from ceremonial dancing to sacrificing animals used to cure someone.
Here are a few Horrible Ancient Medicines and why you shouldn’t try them:
Ancient Egypt – How to cure burns
It was well known that a burn wound could fester and cause disease, but no one knew exactly how to stop it. During the reign of the Pharaohs, the common treatment for a burn was to mix some tree gum, ram hair, and human milk together and slather it over the wound.
Although the process isn’t especially well documented it’s probably safe to assume the ram hair and milk weren’t heat treated to kill any bacteria before being applied. As a treatment not only did it do literally nothing to help a burn, but it greatly increased the chance of infection. For a civilization that built such incredible things, it seems odd they didn’t realize putting hair, milk and something you pulled off a tree on a burn didn’t do anything, because this cure was used for hundreds of years.
Ancient Greece – How to stop toothache
The common cure for toothache was wine, opium, and henbane, with the latter being a plant in the nightshade family whose leaves are used today to make medicine. Henbane leaves can be used to make a medicine that helps with muscle spasms in the digestive system, but it’s safe to say they didn’t know this at the time. As for the wine and opium approach, it seems that even the ancient Greeks believed in the good old method of getting so smashed you can’t feel pain. None of these things would have done anything to cure the toothache and only worked as a marking method so people couldn’t feel it.
The Stone Age – How to cure a headache
When you feel pressure on your brain, what better way to remove it than to get some guy wearing an animal skin to drill a hole through your skull? In the Stone Age and part of the Iron Age, it wasn’t uncommon for certain civilizations to drill a small hole through to the brain in an attempt to relieve the pressure building up inside.
This process was called trepanation and was rarely successful as headaches don’t consist of some kind of gas building up within the skull, and using a stone drill to go within millimeters of the brain isn’t recommended.
Europe until the mid 1800’s – How to cure general sickness
The practice of bloodletting was used all around the world but was especially common within European countries. The idea is that illness is caused by blood within the body being “bad” and cutting someone open to let the bad blood out will cause the body to produce new clean blood. It goes without saying that this didn’t work and was entirely in people’s heads. The only positive effect it could have had was to relieve a little pressure on the system but did nothing to cure any type of sickness.
It was often seen as a treatment for the elite who believed that stress and the burdens of life caused the blood in their system to gain too much pressure, and devices were specially built to make a series of small cuts to let it out.
Second-century China – How to extend life
Today we know that Mercury is a dangerous metal as it gives off poisonous gases when heated. The saying “mad as a hatter” comes from hat makers working with mercury and the fumes eventually causing nervous breakdowns within their brains, giving the impression they had gone mad.
In China during the reign of Emperor Qin Shi Huang, Mercury was known as quicksilver and believed to give the power of extended life and the ability to walk on water. After the emperor drank a potion containing mercury that was designed to make him immortal, he died a painful death shortly afterward and the special medicine stopped being used.
Medieval Europe – How to make yourself immune to the Bubonic Plague
This disease wiped out half the population of Europe and is known as the most devastating outbreak in human history. When someone caught the plague they would weaken and form scabs on their skin often filled with pus. Towards the later part of the Medieval era it was understood that some people who caught diseases in the past were less susceptible to catching them again, and so people tried to infect themselves with just a little bit of plague.
The idea was to introduce a small amount to the body so it could work up a defense against it before it could develop into its incurable state. To do this they would either take a scab off an infected person, grind it up and snort it, or the other method involved making a small cut on your arm and rubbing some infected pus into it.
As disgusting as these methods are they did actually work to an extent, as having a partially weakened form of the disease introduced slowly did give the host a chance to develop an antibody before the disease could fully develop, but this method only slightly increased the chance of fighting it off and would often cause them to be infected with the disease.
