Science

5 Bizarre Medical Treatments Doctors Actually Prescribed in the 1800s

Are you also one of those who believe that modern medicine is frightening? Those open surgeries and all. When I was not a med student i was afraid too.

But I am more afraid when I learned about the historical practice in medicine.

Thank God you are not patient in those times.

At that time, visiting the doctor was riskier than being at home.

I am serious. During that time, medical schools were pumping out doctors who had limited knowledge.

I am not saying they were not good, but compared to today, ancient medicine was so horrifying. Patients are just like experimental rats.

I don’t know; maybe after 100–200 years, the future doctors will say the same about us.

But in history, they worked with filthy hands and rusted knives. Poison was a medicine that was prescribed by them. And they actually thought they were assisting people.

In this blog post today, I am going to talk about 5 of the most outrageous medical treatments that doctors prescribed straight-faced in the Victorian age.

#1. Mercury as a Cure for Syphilis

In the 1800s, when you contracted syphilis, your doctor had a single remedy. That’s mercury.

And not a tiny bit of it, but tremendous quantities, which were applied in the most inhuman manner.

The doctors thought that mercury could cleanse you of the disease.

They administered it in the form of pills, ointments, injections, and vapor baths, as well as vaginal or urethral douches. Yes, you read that correctly.

They literally used to pour liquid mercury into the private parts of people. So horrifying, right? But that’s true.

The therapy was premised on an ancient medical principle that illnesses had to be driven out of the body. Physicians sought evidence that the “purging” was effective: excessive sweating, drooling, vomiting, and diarrhea.

They were not healing signs.

They were symptoms of mercury poisoning.

The side effects were inhumane: loss of teeth, ulcers of the gums, organ failure, nerve damage, serious skin ulcers, and death.

The mercury therapy killed many patients much earlier than the syphilis could have done.

In the early 1900s, one of the physicians documented a case of a 35-year-old woman who douched with mercury and then spent several days vomiting blood prior to falling into a stupor and dying.

This treatment lasted more than 400 years. From the 1500s to the early 1900s. It was evident that it was killing people, yet doctors continued to use it.

Why? Since the syphilis symptoms had momentarily disappeared at the natural dormant stage of the disease, the doctors had assumed that the mercury had taken effect.

They confused coincidence with cure.

Even a proverb had it thus, to sum up the woe: “Two minutes with Venus, two years with Mercury.”

Syphilis would not be treated with mercury until 1943, when penicillin was eventually found to work. Humanity only needed 450 years to discover that poisoning patients was not an effective treatment approach.

2. Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup

P0mbal, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Any parent is aware that a crybaby is tiring.

The answer that Victorian parents gave to their babies, which appears horrifying to us today, was to give them opium.

One of the most popular medicines of the 1800s was Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup. It purported to relieve teething, diarrhea, and fretful babies.

The secret ingredients? A large amount of morphine and sodium carbonate.

At any drugstore, one could purchase a bottle as cheaply as 25 cents. No prescription needed. The advertising was brilliant, recommendations by happy mothers, guarantees of peaceful sleep, and good packaging.

What they failed to promote was the fact that they were basically putting babies under a coma.

The outcomes were foreseeable and depressing. Three or four drops of laudanum (yet another popular opium blend) could overdose a child.

Infants who were overfed never awoke. The Victorian literature is full of allusions to children who were silenced forever by their benevolent guardians.

Queen Victoria was a habitual user of laudanum to treat menstrual cramps and also liked cocaine gum. As long as it was good enough for the queen, working-class mothers reasoned that it must be safe for their babies.

Morphine was also prescribed to babies as late as the 1930s, not only as a teether but also as a treatment for thrush (a fungal mouth infection).

Physicians were not bothered by the idea of prescribing highly addictive narcotics to infants. The thought that drugs would be damaging to the developing brains, or that they could become addicted to the drugs, just did not come to mind.

Only with the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1920 did opium, heroin, cocaine, and morphine become limited and not sold over the counter in any drugstore.

3. Hysteria Cure

And this one is so strange that it reads like fiction. But it is true, and it was decades of normal medical practice.

During the 1800s, physicians thought that there was a condition known as hysteria that afflicted about 75 percent of women in America.

The symptoms were anxiety, irritability, sexual desire, insomnia, faintness, swollen stomach. In short, any complaint that a woman had could be diagnosed as hysteria.

The theory was dated back to ancient medicine and the concept of a wandering womb. Physicians thought that when the uterus of a woman got lost or dissatisfied, it resulted in all types of illness. The treatment? A pelvic massage, which would cause what they referred to as hysterical paroxysm.

Today we call that an orgasm.

However, the culture did not allow the use of that word by Victorian doctors, as they believed that women could not have sexual pleasure or orgasm.

They therefore coined new terms to explain what they were doing.

This “paroxysm” would be obtained by male doctors rubbing female patients by hand. It was deemed a legal medical practice. Physicians even maintained appointment books of women who were visiting to undergo regular treatment.

And this is where it becomes even stranger: this work was considered to be time-consuming and dull by doctors. It might require up to an hour with each patient, and they would become tired of their hands. In 1883, therefore, the first electric vibrator was invented by a British doctor by the name Dr. Joseph Mortimer Granville. He called it the “Manipulator.”

The machine enabled women to self-treat themselves at home, which relieved the doctors of time.

By the early 20 th century, women could even have their own vibrators ordered out of the Sears catalog, just like vacuum cleaners and washing machines.

This treatment was medically justified until the 1920s, when vibrators started featuring in erotic movies. Doctors suddenly discovered that perhaps, perhaps, they were not doing medicine at all.

The therapy simply faded out of medical publications, but no one was sorry about the decades of pseudoscience.

4. Bloodletting of Everything

The Peytel Arybalos,, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Suppose you are ill with a fever. You go to the doctor.

And instead of administering you medicine, he draws out a blade and cuts your arm open to empty several pints of blood.

Welcome to the 1800s medicine, where bloodletting was the preferred treatment to nearly all things: nosebleeds, pneumonia, inflammation, fevers, and even morning sickness in pregnancy.

This was founded on the ancient Greek medicine and the theory of the four humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile.

The doctors thought that an imbalance of these fluids was the cause of illness, and the simplest method of correcting the imbalance was to take away some of the blood.

There were two major approaches of Victorian doctors.

The soft method consisted of the use of leeches that sucked small portions of blood. In the nineteenth century, millions of leeches were imported to England with the express purpose of medical use.

The more violent method was to slash a vein (typically in the arm) and allow the blood to pour out in a bowl until the doctor had deemed that you had lost sufficient.

The reasoning was as follows: when your face is red with fever, you have too much blood. When you are nervous, or cannot sleep, obviously your blood is excited and must be soothed by taking some out.

The problem? Loss of blood does not make you stronger, but weaker. It may lead to shock, fainting, infection, and death.

The pregnant women who were already anemic due to pregnancy were drained, and they were even more ill. Blood loss further weakened sick people, who required their strength to fight infection.

Although the evidence continued to accumulate that bloodletting was bad, physicians continued to perform it during the 1800s. The medical institution was reluctant to reform, and the humoral medical practice was so established that the questioning of it appeared to be radical.

Bloodletting is still in existence in a very small form today under the name phlebotomy therapy, but only in special cases such as hemochromatosis, where excess iron accumulates in the body.

But as a general cure-all? Absolutely not.

5. Strychnine as Constipation Medicine

Strychnine is a lethal poison.

Even a small dose may lead to violent convulsions, muscle spasms, and death.

It is the stuff that murder mysteries are composed of.

And, Victorian doctors recommended it as a constipation remedy.

The oldest medical textbook in the English language that is still published under its original name, the 1899 edition of the Merck Manual, suggested low doses of strychnine as a remedy against acute constipation.

It was theorized that strychnine, which was a derivative of the plant Strychnos nux-vomica, enhanced the gastric activity.

Physicians thought it was a stimulant to the digestive system and got the things going once more. They were not completely mistaken; strychnine does have an influence on the work of nerves, but the danger was much more than any possible advantages.

Merck Manual of 1899 proposed alternative treatment of constipation as well: opium (constipating agent), turpentine (paint thinner), and injections of different substances. The more reasonable ones, such as eating apples and figs, drinking coffee, and exercising, were placed at the bottom of the list.

Another poisonous substance is arsenic, which was also prescribed to treat any kind of illness in the 1800s.

It was drunk, applied to the skin, introduced into the rectum, injected, inhaled, and ingested.

The medicines available in the Victorian era were full of appalling levels of poisonous substances, which physicians thought were therapeutic in low doses. They were playing a life threatening game without knowing the cumulative effects or the long term toxicity.

The irony lies in the fact that constipation is often resolved with mere changes in lifestyle- an increase in fiber, water, and movement. Instead, Victorian doctors grabbed lethal poisons.