Horrific History | Medicine, hospitals and doctors

There have been many horrific tales through history, from gruesome medical practices to bizarre punishments and even some very questionable cleaning habits. Today, we’ll be looking at those gruesome medical practices – so many sure you’re not eating while reading this! Also apologies to anyone with an upcoming doctor’s appointment, we promise, modern medicine is nowhere near as horrific!

The path to modern medicine is littered with horrible tales and we’ve compiled several of them here to make you feel grateful that rather than just drilling a hole in your head, you can just pop to the chemist and buy paracetamol when you have a headache.

While Nye Bevan is credited with launching the NHS in UK, it is St Benedict, the Benedictine monk, who is credited with establishing the first hospital in Britain all the way back in the 6^th century. Though he had the best intentions at heart, you likely wouldn’t have received the kind of care you would expect from a hospital stay.

One of the greatest medical disasters of history was the Black Death, which arrived in the 1340s and spread throughout the country, killing thousands of people. Also known as the Bubonic Plague, it attacks the lymphatic system and resulted in swellings, which weeped puss and blood, along with fever, chills, vomiting and then, death. It was terrifyingly contagious and affected the body incredibly quickly, with many succumbing to the plague within 24 hours. Doctors at the time struggled with the number of patients and came up with some frankly bizarre and in some cases, ingenious ways of fighting the plague including:

• Rubbing vinegar over the body (vinegar is a well known disinfectant and had been in use since the Ancient Greeks)
• Rubbing onions on the boils (it was believed that the onion would draw out toxins)
• Blood letting (this was a popular cure for just about everything but in the case of the Black Death, it had no positive effects.)
• Plucking a chicken and then tying it, while still alive, to the patient. (They believed that the chicken would draw out the toxins, however, the infections they carried likely hastened death.)
• Smearing faeces on the boils (yep, it was probably worse than having Black Death in the first place to be honest.)
• Flagellation (basically, whipping yourself, you have to remember, people were very religious back then.)

Weird treatments were not just used during the middle ages. Did you know that human remains were a common ingredient in medicine all the way up until the 20^th century? Usually, the remains were ground up into a fine powder and turned into pills – mummified remains were particularly valued as remedies, which is why there are so few mummies these days. It was widely considered that ingesting certain body parts would help cure illnesses in those areas – so if you had a headache, you’d ingest crushed skulls. Nice. Crushed skulls were actually a favourite remedy of King Charles II – he would regularly drink alcohol mixed with powdered human skulls. He used to call this the King’s Drops and he believed that it kept him healthy. Much like taking vitamins today.

It wasn’t just doctors using human bodies to treat illnesses, dentists did too. The teeth of the deceased were used to make dentures during the 1800s, these were known as Waterloo teeth because they were pulled from the mouths of dead soldiers. Thankfully, that went out of fashion fairly quickly.

A popular cure throughout history was a practice called Trepanning. This was used to treat a range of diseases and injuries, mostly to the head and neck and involved drilling a hole in the skull to release pressure. It was used on those with both physical and mental illnesses. It was the precursor to the lobotomy and though you might not think it, it did have a 90% survival rate! Surviving an operation in the past wasn’t always a good thing however as it was worryingly common for doctors to mistakenly pronounce people as dead. It happened so often that safety coffins were invented!

If the idea of trepanning, being attached to a chicken and blood letting were not horrific enough, did you know that the chainsaw was invented to help with child birth? The first chainsaw was created by John Aitken and James Jeffray in 1780, they called it the Osteotome and used it to cut through a woman’s pelvis when they were too far gone for a caesarean. So, though we all praise being able to go to a hospital to have a baby, perhaps it might have been better to have just had it at home if you happened to be starting a family in the 1700s.

Stay tuned for more horrific history on our blog!